Tiny Books Just Right For Short Stories Publishers Find Small Is Beautiful In World Of Short Attention Spans

When Venice writer Tom Lang first shopped around his fiction, he thought big. He sent his stories to exclusive literary magazines and major publishing houses.

When the rejections arrived, Lang didn’t give up. Instead, he started thinking small. Four inches by five inches, to be exact. That’s the size of his self-published book called “Coffee,” which runs all of 59 tiny pages.

Lang has brewed up a funny, entertaining and succinct tale of two coffee junkies who fall in love at an Oregon coffeehouse.

Of course, the emotional pangs they feel for each other may really be caffeine-induced hyper-tension.

The publishing buzz that this and other pocket-sized works are generating, however, is quite real.

In an era of million-dollar advances and mega-sized best-sellers so weighty they could crush little dogs, the biggest news in publishing these days is the explosion of tiny books that could barely harm a flea.

Newcomers like Lang are taking the undersized route to break into the literary world by self-publishing their own miniature works.

Big publishing houses are also going small to put a charge in their paperback sales, releasing dozens of slim, wallet-sized books that often sell for a buck.

Maybe you’re intimidated by the length of today’s best-selling tomes, or perhaps too weak to hold them up to read.

As an alternative, you can pick up a collection of essays by Albert Camus or a short novel by Virginia Woolf that fits in your pocket, costs less than the price of a Sunday paper and can be read cover-to-cover while you’re killing time in a waiting room.

Lang’s yarn, which took two months to craft, is over and done with in the time it takes to savor a cup or two of fine joe.

“People see that this story has a beginning,a middle and an end. It’s kind of cool,” Lang says. “It takes about 20 minutes to read and that’s pretty much the limit in 1996 before people start to drift off.”

The limited attention span of modern readers was one of the reasons Kim Nopson opened The Tales book shop on La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles. The store is devoted to the short story and now carries Lang’s new work.

“My experience is that I get so busy I haven’t been able to sit down and read a novel,” she says.

“I started reading short stories because I can finish them. We get smaller and smaller blocks of time.”

At Dutton’s Books in Brentwood, which also carries Lang’s work, owner Doug Dutton says the appeal of the slim work goes beyond its brevity.

“He’s told an engaging story and it has literary merit,” Dutton says.

“The book is a little like espresso. It’s small, tightly packed and full of flavor. And in one gulp it’s gone.”