Shelf Life

Scott A. Smith, photographed by Herbert Gleason. In the early 20th century Smith was the resident expert on Monadnock. ("The Heart of Monadnock")

In short order
At Rose Metal Press, less is more. Since its founding in 2006, the Brookline-based nonprofit has published four collections of short short fiction.

Now co-founders Abigail Beckel and Kathleen Rooney, who met in graduate school at Emerson College, are gathering exercises and essays for a book to be called "The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Short Short Fiction."

One topic the guide will address is the many names for the genre. In addition to "short short fiction," it is also called "flash fiction," "micro-fiction," "sudden fiction," and "smoke-long" (because reading a story of under 1,000 words presumably takes as long as smoking a cigarette).

Whatever it's called, Beckel and Rooney believe it will endure. Earlier this year Rose Metal won a design award at the New England Book Show for "The Sky Is a Well and Other Shorts," by Claudia Smith. The judges noted that the attention to detail apparent in the hand-printed and hand-sewn book underscored "the intrinsic value of literature."

Brookline Booksmith is hosting an evening of readings by Rose Metal authors at 7 on Saturday. Geoffrey Forsyth and Amy L. Clark will read from their short short fiction, and Peter Jay Shippy will read from his book-length poem "How to Build the Ghost in Your Attic."

Magic mountain
A tale of spiritual renewal on Mount Monadnock is back in print, thanks to Surry Cottage Books, in Keene, N.H. "The Heart of Monadnock," by Elizabeth Weston Timlow, was originally published in 1922 by B. J. Brimmer Co. of Boston.

Timlow, principal of a girls' boarding school in Washington, D.C., was leading students on a tour of Europe when World War I broke out. Upon her return to the States, she sought solace on Mount Monadnock, where she summered for 30 years. She claimed to have heard the mountain speak to her - in Latin, no less - and returned to her hotel room to write the manuscript about her spiritual awakening.

In an essay in the new edition, publisher Craig Brandon touches on Timlow's humble beginnings, her progressive thinking about girls' education, and her unconventional ideas about spirituality.

Case studies
"The House of God," a darkly comic novel about doctors in training published 30 years ago, continues to stir debate in medical circles. This fall the novel by Dr. Stephen Bergman, writing under the pen name Samuel Shem, will be the subject of a two-day symposium in Cleveland.

Now Shem has written a new novel. "The Spirit of the Place" (Kent State University) examines the state of medicine in America through the eyes of a young doctor who returns to his hometown in upstate New York and takes over his mentor's medical practice.

Coming out