Short Edition is a French online publisher making short stories available to readers in French and English. There is a range of genres, including romance and science fiction and fantasy, and the stories are sorted according to how long it takes to read them: 1 minute, 3 minutes, or 5 minutes. In 2016, Short Edition launched its “distributeurs d’histoires courtes” or “short story dispensers.” There are 199 of these machines, and they print out short stories on demand and for free. What a concept!
You can find short story dispensers at places such as the Philadelphia Airport, SNCF train stations including the Gare de l’Est in Paris and stations in Montpellier and Bordeaux, and the library of the University of Texas at Arlington. Francis Ford Coppola installed a dispenser in his Café Zoetrope in San Francisco. A great little video tells the story of how Coppola came to love the idea:
For a few months now, I’ve been translating French stories into English for Short Edition. Here’s a brief round-up of some of my favorites:
“Nasturtiums” by Suzanne Buck
With great economy of prose, this first-person narrative tells the story of a woman whose grief over the loss of a child has led her to obsessively paint nasturtiums. Her marriage is falling apart. Will she be able to save it? The first line is a doozy: “I was in the middle of painting a vein when my husband came into my studio and announced that he was leaving me for another woman.”
“One November Night Near the Oberbaumbrücke” by Aubry Françon
The fall of the Berlin Wall is the setting for this story of an old man in East Berlin and his lost love. A terrible secret had made her flee to West Germany when the wall went up, but she promised that she would see him again one day when the wall came down. The story moves back in and forth in time, but remains centered on the man’s experience of one November night after the wall comes down, when the possibility of being reunited with Liselotte makes him brave the crowds, the guards, and the unknown.
“Lynx” by André Page
This evocative story describes a lonely fur trapper leaving his log cabin and trekking to the Hudson Bay trading post. There he discovers a letter waiting for him that will change his life. Descriptive detail creates sensations of this harshly beautiful environment. “His snowshoes of wood and caribou leather straps creaked in the frozen early morning air. His steps were long and slow, and his heart was heavy, heavier even than the weight of his bag and rifle on his back.”
If you don’t come across a short story dispenser, you can also read stories in French or English on Short Edition’s website.
Image: Short story dispenser in Café Zoetrope, photo Kalman N. Muller