The long and the short of it

Alice Munro's "Away From Her" (Vintage: 76 pp., $9 paper) is not a new book -- not really. Rather, it's a stand-alone edition of her 1999 short story "The Bear Came Over the Mountain," retitled as a tie-in for the film that it inspired. According to a preface, director and screenwriter Sarah Polley read the story and couldn't shake it; the resulting movie, which stars Julie Christie and Olympia Dukakis, opens May 4.

Of course, Munro's is hardly the first short story to be repackaged and sold as a tie-in; in the last few years alone, Annie Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain" has appeared as a similar kind of mini-book, as has Philip K. Dick's "The Minority Report." Nor is "Away From Her" the only new movie to draw its inspiration from a piece of short fiction. Ray Lawrence's "Jindabyne," which opens a week before the Polley film, recasts Raymond Carver's exquisite "So Much Water So Close to Home."

As for what this means, well, either it's a renaissance for the short story or yet another indication that people in Hollywood can't read at length. Regardless, it's fascinating to see major publishers embrace a format that many smaller, independent presses have relied upon for decades; indeed, Carver's first book of fiction was a chapbook featuring a single story, "Put Yourself in My Shoes," published by Santa Barbara's Capra Press in 1974.

— David L. Ulin 4/17/07