Spoken Ink

For me short stories are like pork pies or truffles; there are lots of mediocre ones about, but anyone who has sampled the real thing knows that there is nothing finer.

If you favour a diet of literary pork pies and truffles then it is high time that you visited Spoken Ink. The company deals in audio stories - that is, short stories read out loud that you can listen to on your ipod, phone or computer. Strangely, while you can easily download a six hour novel, if you want a story then you have to settle for Radio 4 (no sex or swearing) , and until now there was no way of buying what you liked.

Spoken Ink sells audio stories by well-known authors such as Roald Dahl, Julian Barnes, and Angela Carter for download at as little as 99p. The stories are read by established actors and vary in content from moonlit romps to serious stuff by Nikolai Gogol.

Short stories have been off the map for a while,  perhaps partly because people don’t like reading short story collections. To labour the pork pie/truffle thing, no one wants to eat a whole bowl. A short story should be consumed as it was written, individually, in bite-size chunks that take no longer than a commute, a pile of ironing, or that half an hour before you fall asleep.

But the short story is getting popular again. In the last five years there has been an outbreak of new short story prizes. Most astonishingly there is the BBC short story prize pot of £15,000 and then, last month, The Times offered £25,000 for a single story of 7,000 words. The short story has elbowed its way into literary events across the country and in some places, like Small Wonder in Sussex, set up its own annual festival.
And of course with money like this around, modern writers have sat up and are taking notes.

Try authors such as Shannon Cain, Nicola Barker or Mick Jackson, all of whom are brilliant. And if you want something a little different, then why not come along to a Spoken Ink storytelling session? The company has also been doing storytelling events at 40 Winks, which were recently given the accolade of 9th best thing to do in the world by The Sunday Times Travel Magazine. Also, thanks to the Arts Council and in honour of the season of death, they will be telling ghost stories, hideous poems and piratical songs in a giant yurt in Green Park. The stories are horrible, the songs are menacing and the poems will make you sick. Definitely not for the faint hearted.

If that’s not your bag then on Valentine’s Day in Regent’s Park there will be erotic stories with naked models; tales of good cheer for Christmas in Hyde Park or Arabian Nights in Richmond for the first full moon of Spring. Come along to any of these and get a free Bloody Mary when you mention Open Magazine. Get tickets and audio stories by visiting www.spokenink.co.uk
 
After deciding that journalism would be too much work Edmund Caldecott set up Spoken Ink on the whim that everybody loves a good story. He is a short story writer and is of the firm belief that a white lie is often far more interesting than the truth - which is why he was no good at journalism.