Bonsai Stories
* The aesthetics of the petite *
A blog about flash & short stories
From Planodion literary magazine
The blog Bonsai Stories is simultaneously an online review about flash & short stories and a continuously enriched online anthology of the same literary genres. It specializes in Greek short stories, while presenting quality translations of short stories from various languages into Greek, aiming at the most possible representability, given the means available. At the same time, by introducing the column Greek Writers In English, it addresses the large community of the users of English as a native or a second tongue, having as its primary goal the better acquaintance of the international art-loving readers with the Greek short story writing.
The blog is published and managed by the poet and publisher of Planodion literary magazine, Yiannis Patilis. It is maintained by the writer, Iro Nikopoulou, while its material is provided and selected by researcher Giorgos Zevelakis and the following group of writers, academics and professional translators: Giorgos Havoutsas, Evgenia Kritschevskaya, Evi Ksiromeriti, Vassilis Manoussakis, Constantinos Paleologos, Stamatis Polenakis, Maria Spyridopoulou, Elena Stagouraki and Maro Triantafyllou.
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In the long discussion concerning the definition of «flash fiction» in terms of length, the present blog agrees to accept the limit of 2,000 words maximum. At present, for the original (unpublished) contributions in Greek it sets the limit of 750 words, while for the reprints from Greek literature the limit of words is increased to 1,500· the same number of words (for the original texts) is set for translations as well.
The blog, without excluding any of the modalities of the genre, encourages and promotes stories with plot and at least one character or characters· moreover, taking into full account the definition difficulties that might rise from marginal cases, it considers fiction —the artistic fabrication and construction of a story— as the main ingredient of the definition of short story as a literary genre.
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The blog, aspiring to the central qualities of a flash fiction story: the brevity of the narrative functions, the inextricable connection of the parts with the whole and the necessary self-restriction by the author, introduces the international horticultural term «bonsai», along with its historical and cultural context, as an extremely appropriate term to symbolize this particular literary form.
