It is probably no coincidence that the generation which, as children, munched on a chocolate bar called Pätkis('Shorty') now writes short prose, which the literary scholar Mervi Kantokorpi has named after the same confectionery:      'In the space of just over ten years, what is known as short prose has become a genre bastard in Finnish literature, which could be given the nickname pätkis. It has insinuated itself into the space between the novel and the short story without refraining from argument with either.      'Of course, it does not emerge from an unknown primal darkness, for pieces of prose have been written in Finland before. The genre of serial short prose, however, is a product of its own postmodern period, and its cousins include the strip cartoon, the television series and many of the forms of presentation of visual art.' How does short prose work? I would not compare short prose to television series, but rather to television itself: the continuous, pulsating flood of programming within which are constructed tensions, contrasts, repetition that keeps the whole in place.      During the course of an evening, a large group of familiar people speak; talking heads, whose self-centred monologues together create a shared, mosaic-like witness statement. A kind of novelistic wide-screen picture.      A picture of the world? Not quite, perhaps. But a speech-world that is related to the novel. The novel has long kept its place at the core of European literature, even though oral culture has made a new breakthrough in the age of television. People tend not to have the patience to follow a lengthy epic. We want to see, listen and read self-centred monologues whose duration is two minutes at most.      Thus short prose responds to a need as surely as does television. But I do not believe that writers who write short prose are merely trimming their sails to suit the wind. I believe that they reflect a fundamental change in their attitude to the world and its description. A novelist had – and has – to master the art of synthesis in the spirit of the 18th-century encylopédistes. As the writer Matti Pulkkinen has remarked, 'The novel is like a pig – it eats anything.' But a good writer can use diverse materials to build a well-formed whole.      Short prose, on the other hand, was born in the age of chaos theory and the uncertainty principle, when making syntheses has become more and more difficult: reality speaks unclearly, swiftly and about everything at once – and such chaos cannot easily be arranged into a linear narrative.      People, on the other hand, speak clearly, about little things that are close to themselves. For that reason, short prose allows people to talk for themselves and leaves its readers to listen to characters' conversation and to fashion the open landscape of speaking into stories. Short prose is a genre bastard, but it is not alone in the world of pure genres. It has malformed second cousins in almost all areas of literature.      One of these is the articlette, a term coined by the poet Lauri Otonkoski: a cross between the prose poem and the miniature essay. Otonkoski grew tired of constant uncertainty and decided eventually to capture the final truth about the world. But if it cannot be captured in one great system of thought, it is necessary to begin brick by brick, detail by detail: from your local bar to a state of happiness cut short by catastrophe.      Jyrki Kiiskinen      Editor-in-chief Top of page