Edgar Allan Poe
The world seems to constantly tell all of us storytellers that we must write a novel as soon as possible, that stories are learning to develop more extensive works, but many times I still doubt it. And possibly these 5 great storytellers in history they also thought about it at the time until accepting that they felt more comfortable in the brief and the subtle, being theirs some of the most universal narratives of our time.
Antón Chéjov
The world of the story could not be conceived without the storyteller's cousin Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, the man who brought that cold, apathetic and brief Russia to the rest of the world in the mid-nineteenth century and until today in which Chekhov continues to be one of the references of short literature thanks to his crude naturalism, to characters that matter even more than the argument itself.
Alice Munro
Alice Munro, winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature.
The spokesperson of the Nobel in 2013 named her "teacher of the contemporary tale"Despite having published a novel, The Life of Women, the Canadian Munro confirms that she feels more comfortable in her tales of sad women, despotic husbands and seafaring towns where intimate tragedies are chewed. The moons of Jupiter or Too much happiness they are, possibly, two of the most outstanding examples of his career.
Charles Perrault
The fame of Fairy Tales it would not exist without him, without that French author who in the seventeenth century decided to substitute political poems for the sweetened version of crude medieval legends in the form of tales set in castles, sustained by the touch of a fairy and immortalized by princesses. Mother Goose Tales, published in 1655, was the trigger for tales such as Sleeping Beauty or Little Red Riding Hood that would go on to become eternal narratives, an excuse for the moral and as a reason for reinvention by other authors such as the Brothers Grimm whose objective was always to prevent their oral antecedents from dying with the passage of time.
Edgar Allan Poe
"A story must have a unique humor and each sentence must revolve around it", was a phrase that defined the creation of the American writer. And in his case, the humor was rather gloomy, creepy and mystical. The author of The Black Cat was a key piece in the reinvention of the fantasy and horror genre: He reinvented the Gothic novel, sowed the seed of French surrealism, fostered the detective and also confirmed that living by writing alone was not an easy task as he was the first American author to officially propose it.
Jorge Luis Borges
Latin America is full of great storytellers: from Gabo to Octavio Paz, from Juan Rulfo to Cortázar, but if there is an author who managed to stand out above the rest as an outright "storyteller" that was Borges.. With theology, the allegorical and the metaphysical as the basis of his work, Borges has left an eternal residue in universal letters, more specifically in the Spanish-speaking, indelible, dotted with all those "directed dreams" that literature symbolizes for the Argentine author.
These 5 great storytellers in history They represent a literary genre nurtured by great works and authors who were in charge of defending the brief and turning the subtlety of the story into the star ingredient of this type of narration.
The question is: is the story a genre to vindicate? Will it be back in fashion? Or has it already started to reclaim its place on the shelves?