Welcome to shortillas!!!

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Short stories, (or at least the memorable ones: the ones that slide symbiotically, inconspicuously, into our central nervous systems, like Mycorrhizal fungi into the roots of a tree), short stories like these, perhaps, are best consumed in singles, like tortillas... bunching them together as if they were kindling might kill the joy of life out of them. 

Because if you thought of the novel as being all about Architecture and poetry as being all about Interior Design, the short story form could bring in the best of both, couldn't it? It is so androgynous, amphibian. 

Which is why, merely reading the stories on my Read The Stories  page (you can read all the stories for free) will not do. Let me put it like this: does prose have to be, "This trackless desert of print which we see before us, winding on and on into the purple distance..." as P.G. Wodehouse puts it in the introduction to his first Omnibus book: The World of Jeeves; especially in this day and age where we can do so much with a simple text editor? 

Because, using a text editor as you would a typewriter is something like washing your backside with eau de cologne! You could do so much with a text editor: you could write into a page preset to dimensions of your choice; you could choose your font/s, font-size/s, line-spacing/s, indentation/s... in other words you could make the flow of information/ emotion from line to line (poets even have a word for this: they call it enjambment!), stanza to stanza, page to page a part of the narrative. So that the Story and the Medium through which the story is being told, become inextricable, as in an Opera for example. 

Because there are two things that you can do with language: a) Communicate (as I am doing right now, writing this droll and boring essay) and b) Composition (which is what I attempt to do in my stories). Only, with the aid of a modern text-editor (and the Sheer Egoism and Aesthetic Enthusiasm of a poet) it is possible to add to these pieces of Composition some stage design as well!  

Which is why, when you do read my stories on my Read The Stories page what you get is a mere glimpse of the music-sheet. If you want tickets for the opera, purchase my stories by visiting my Buy the Stories page... 

Yours,

Kartik 















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