Say It All in Six Words.(The Talk of the Town)('Not Quite What I Was Planning')(Book review)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 25-FEB-08

Bookmark this article Print this article Link to this article Email this article Digg It! Add to del.icio.us RSS

COPYRIGHT 2008 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Brevity: a good thing in writing. Exploited by texters, gossip columnists, haikuists. Not associated with the biography genre. But then--why shouldn't it be? Life expectancies rise; attention spans shrink. Six words can tell a story. That's a new book's premise, anyway. "Not Quite What I Was Planning." A compilation of teeny tiny memoirs. The forebear, it's assumed, is Hemingway. (Legend: he wrote a miniature masterpiece. "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." Slightly sappy, but a decent sixer.)

The book's originator: SMITH online magazine. It started as a reader contest: Your life story in six words. The magazine was flooded with...

Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.