ABSTRACT
In 2014, a British short film called The Voorman Problem, directed by Mark Gill and staring Martin Freeman and Tom Hollander, appeared on the list of nominees for the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film. This Oscar category has been known under its current name only since 1974, but there have been various categories of award for short film since the fifth Academy Awards in 1932. Despite this longstanding Academy recognition of the short form, winners and nominees of this category receive little attention in press coverage of the Oscars which focuses almost exclusively on the feature film awards. Critical and popular attention to the writing of David Mitchell commits a similar oversight, focusing again almost exclusively on his long, rather than his short, fiction. This might not be surprising, given the richness of Mitchell’s novelistic canon to date: seven published novels, as well as one unpublished novel (his first, The Old Moon) and one time-locked novella (From Me Flows What You Call Time, on which more later). These range across time, space and genre with an insouciant disregard for limits or boundaries of any kind. But Mitchell now also has an established body of published short stories including ‘The January Man’ (2003), ‘What You Do Not Know You Want’ (2004b), ‘Acknowledgements’ (2005a), ‘Hangman’ (2005b), ‘Preface’ (2006), ‘Dénoument’ (2007a), ‘Judith Castle’ (2007b), ‘The Massive Rat’ (2009b), ‘Character Development’ (2009a), ‘Muggins Here’ (2010b), ‘Earth Calling Taylor’ (2010c), ‘The Siphoners’ (2011a), ‘The Gardener’ (2011b), ‘An Inside Job’ (2012a), ‘In the Bike Sheds’ (2012b), ‘Lots of Bits of Star’ (2013), ‘Variations on a Theme by Mister Donut’ (2014b), ‘The Right Sort’ (2014c), ‘My Eye on You’ (2016a) and ‘A Forgettable Story’ (2017).
