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Tales from the memory bank
After a week away, our arts section reviews two more compelling six-word stories for you, either to whet your appetite for more great literature – in which case you’re probably looking at the wrong column – or to save you the bother of reading them right to the end.
As one of Thanet District Council’s finest novelists, William Neech takes the contractor thriller genre to new heights with the spare finality of: ‘The consultant did it, he’s gone.’
And a mysterious new talent on the scene, an author who signs himself only as Andrew, blazes brightly like a young meteor with the informal knockabout support desk comedy: ‘Really! Mine doesn’t do that’.
Surely "The consultant did it, he’s gone" and "Really! Mine doesn’t do that" cannot both be six-word stories. If you count an apostrophied word as one word, then the first story is 6 words, while the second is only 5. If however, you count an apostrophied word as two words ("he is" or "does not") then the first is 7 words, and the second is 6. Having both these stories in the same paragraph presents some sort of paradox...
Posted by :Andy | August 21, 2007 1:50 PM