Etgar Keret’s Short Stories for the MTV Generation

Just because MTV hasn’t played a music video in at least a decade (the last one aired around the time we discovered there weren’t chicken in the sea), doesn’t mean the form is as as dead as the radio star. When Etgar Keret, the brilliant author of Suddenly a Knock at the Door, makes the “literary equivalent of a music video” he isn’t hoping to reach MTV’s Times Square studio, but Sundance and an entirely new audience.

In the “Storyvid” below, Etgar’s short story “What Do We Have in Our Pockets?” is brought to a new form by Goran Dukic, director of Wristcutters: A Love Story.

The Storyvid concept brings a “director’s visual reading to a short text,” Etgar explained over email. The videos aren’t intended to give potential readers an excuse to just-wait-for-the-movie-to-come-out, however. Etgar isn’t trying to replace reading, but trying to “remind people who don’t how great it is to read.”

“I always like new forms and mediums for storytelling,” said Etgar, who’s also written fiction, film scripts, and comics. “If I could tap dance a story, I’d do it too.”

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Etgar Keret guest edits Recommended Reading
Electric Literature’s Single Sentence Animations

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–Benjamin Samuel is the co-editor of Electric Literature. He’s live-tweeting the adaptation of his tap-dance novel to a music video here.