Jeg sidder på hovedbanegårdens nye, tarvelige Starbucks og citerer Norman Mailer, som disser novellen fyrsteligt

He (NM i 3. perrson) does not have the gift to write great short stories og perhaps even very good ones. In fact, he will confess he does not have the interest, the respect or the proper awe. The short story bores him a little. He will admit he rarely reads them. He is, in secret, not fond of writers who work at short stories, Nor are they often, he suspects, fond of him. He has a private sneer for the reputations they have amassed. There is a terrible confession to make: he thinks the short story is relatively easy to write. You only have to be good for a da or a week - there is none of that arduous collaboration between character and passion, inspiration and ascetism, which goes into keeping one's balance on the teeter-totter of a novel where work goes on day after day through many a season into the years. Anyone can be good for a week, but who can be good for a year, or two, or three?

(og ja, 'novellefobi' har jeg selvfølgelig for længst tagget)

Norman Mailer som short short storyteller

Meget Lydiaske (OG Normanske) disse to helt korte korttekster, der tilsammen udgør afsnittet "Microbes", i paperbacken The Short Fiction of Norman Mailer, som jeg snuppede i går i Gentoftes Biblioteks frilufts-bogbørs (jeg stikker dubletter af Thøger Jensen, Schnack, Barnett Newman tilbage lige om lidt):

IT

We were going thorugh the barbed-wire when a machine gun started. I kept walking until I saw my head lying on the ground.
  "My God, I'm dead," my head said.
  And my body fell over.

THE SHORTEST NOVEL OF THEM ALL

At first she thought she could kill him in three days.
  She did nearly. His heart proved nearly unequal to her compliments.
  Then she thought it would take three weeks. But he survived.
  So she revised her tables and calculated three months.
  After three years, he was still alive. So they got married.
  No they've been married for thirty years. People speak warmly of them. They are known as the best marriage in town.
  It's just that their children keep dying.