Economista by Bruna Gomes

I have always loved a novella. I love a collection of short stories. I don’t believe a novel has to be exactly 80,000 words that equate to roughly 300 book pages.

A story has its own natural form that may be 10,000 words or it may be 30,000 words or even much longer.

I love the line of Ultimo Shorts. I love the smallness of the books and how portable they are. These are very contained books!

Economista by Bruna Gomes is fantastic and I can’t wait to read her other fiction. There was something so intense and web-like about this novella. It was like being ensnared in a particular world and trying to figure out exactly what was going on with the narrator. I found myself questioning the stability of her perception, if she was misjudging the girls around her and if any of them were deserving of her trust.

Why can’t every novel be so contained and so fantastic? Why are there so many novels with too much padding and would read a lot better if they were pared back from the publishing default of a 300-page novel?

So far in the Ultimo Shorts, I have read The Young Geriatric by Elizabeth Bryer and Afraid of the Dark by Hossein Asgari. I loved the stories in Afraid of the Dark. They had a touch of the absurd and stylistically, they were like Only Sound Remains and Desolation. As for The Young Geriatric, I can’t remember the last time I was that delighted by the language in a novel.

I hope these books do fantastically and that publishers take a risk on shorter novels and shorter fiction. There is greater scope for experimentation with the shorter form and it just makes for exciting reading. And I hope that Ultimo Press do this line of Ultimo Shorts once again!