William Faulkner, Flying High

		William Faulkner (1897 – 1962) On this day in 1919, twenty-two-year-old William Faulkner published his first prose, a short story entitled “Landing in Luck.” It is a lighthearted tale about an air force cadet’s first solo flight, and it gives little sign of the style or fame to come, but the autobiographical details behind its telling are pure, playful Faulkner. They also might make the author worthy of his hero’s description as “the biggest liar in the R. A. F.”

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Barry wins Sunday Times Short Story Award

| By Lisa Campbell

Kevin Barry’s story about a group of middle-aged men and their passion for authentic beer has been awarded the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award for 2012.

The Irish author was presented with a £30,000 cheque by author Joanna Trollope at a ceremony at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival on Friday (30th March).

Seeing off competition from Orange-prize listed The Sealed Letter author Emma Donoghue, Jean Kwok, Tom Lee, Robert Minhinnick and Linda Oatman High, Barry’s tale was described by judge Melvyn Bragg as a story which “takes a disregarded and often scorned stratum of male pals and finds wit, pathos and great energy.”

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Lost Charlotte Brontë short story to be published

A short story Charlotte Brontë wrote for a married teacher with whom she fell in love is to be published for the first time after it was found in a museum. Photo: Mary Evans Picture Library / Alamy

A short story Charlotte Brontë wrote for a married teacher with whom she fell in love is to be published for the first time after it was found in a museum.

By Murray Wardrop

The work entitled L’Ingratitude is penned in grammatically incorrect French and is the first known piece of homework set by her Belgian tutor Constantin Heger.

Brontë, who studied under Heger in Brussels alongside her sister Emily, became infatuated with the married tutor, writing several love letters to him after returning to England.

The manuscript was discovered by Brian Bracken, a Brussels-based archivist and Brontë expert, in Belgium’s Musée Royal de Mariemont.

The story was last heard of in 1913, when it was given to a wealthy Belgian collector by Heger’s son, Paul, Mr Bracken said.

Writing in the London Review of Books, which will publish the story this week, Mr Bracken said: “By all accounts a gifted and dedicated teacher, [Heger] gave Emily and Charlotte homework … based on texts by authors they had studied in class.

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PRZ WNR? Will Cohu’s ‘Two Bad Thumbs’ Shortlisted Beside Lionel Shriver And Diana Athill

An author who has written in text speak could soon be all smiley faces and LOLs after finding himself in the running for the world’s richest short story prize.

Will Cohu’s story Two Bad Thumbs is pitted against literary heavyweights such as We Need To Talk About Kevin writer Lionel Shriver and former Costa Book Award winner Diana Athill.

They feature on a longlist of 20 titles competing for the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award 2012, which is worth £30,000 to the winner.

Journalist and novelist Cohu – twice shortlisted for the award – has written his story using text messages to create a seedy tale of an affair unravelling.

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The Shortest Story Ever

By Gabe Habash

Look, time is precious–we don’t have time to crack open a book from this list, even if some of them are by Tolstoy and Proust. So, for the minute-crunchers out there who still need their literature fix, we’ve included a pint-sized list of tiny tales below; stories that are short enough to read, in their entirety, in the time it takes for you to conjure up a sneeze and expel it. Heck, even this intro paragraph looks like Clarissa next to these short shorts.

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