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Here’s a Super-Short Story from a Mad, or at Least Quirky, Hungarian

“When I was seventy-eight I discovered that my wife had been betraying me with another man for fifty-four years, so I went to St. Margaret’s Bridge and took a lovely header into the river, thereby winning the diving championship of the Metropolitan Athletic Club. Subsequently, I established a record in underwater swimming, for I stayed under water for two and a half days, whereas my nearest rival, Kankovsky, could only bear it for two minutes and nineteen and a half seconds.”

Book design junkie Will Schofield uncovers The Moral, a quirky super-short story by Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy.  A shaggy-dog tale, as it turns out, but with a punchline that Robert Frost would love. 

Bonus points: Frigyes Karinthy is the guy who first proposed ‘six degrees of separation,’ in his 1929 story Chains.

The Moral comes from a later Karinthy collection, which had this wonderful cover:

Yes, this IS two men in a bath week at Who2.

{ 50 Watts via Jessa Crispin }

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