Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories

Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories

ISBN-10:
0879052651
ISBN-13:
9780879052652
Pub. Date:
12/31/1983
Publisher:
Smith, Gibbs Publisher
ISBN-10:
0879052651
ISBN-13:
9780879052652
Pub. Date:
12/31/1983
Publisher:
Smith, Gibbs Publisher
Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories

Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories

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Overview

We who love prose fiction love these miniature tales both to read and to write because they are so finite; so highly compressed and highly charged." Joyce Carol Oates

"People who like to skip can't skip in a three-page story." Grace Paley

"The short-short story is an exercise in virtuosity that tightens the circle of mystery surrounding what we know." John L'Heureux

"It can do in a page what a novel does in two hundred. It covers years in less time, time in almost no time. It wants to deliver us to where we were before we began. Its aim is restorative, to keep us young." Mark Strand

"There are, in truth, more kinds of short-short stories than I ever knew of or imagined. Wonderful! I rejoice in the richness and variety of all these voices." George Garrett

"This collection represents the richness and variety of American writers. The 70 pieces themselves—highly compressed, often tantalizing—display a multiplicity of modes and derive them a variety of traditions." Publishers Weekly


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780879052652
Publisher: Smith, Gibbs Publisher
Publication date: 12/31/1983
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 264
Product dimensions: 8.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.56(d)
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

Robert Shapard teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Hawaii, and co-edited Flash Fiction Forward.

James Thomas is the founding editor of Quarterly West and the author of Pictures, Moving, a collection of stories.

Read an Excerpt

Introduction

All the works in this collection are from one to five pages long, and all are by American authors. A few are familiar, but the great majority have been published within the last five years.

Because they are so new, and sometimes so unlike the modern notion of story, it was by no means clear at the outset exactly what to call these works. Short-short stories? Fictions? Or something else entirely? Almost nothing has been said about them yet by literary critics, so we asked the editors who publish them, and especially the writers who write them, What are these things? And, Why are we seeing so many of them now? With our queries, we sent an early version of this book under the working title, Blasters.

Table of Contents

A Sudden Story

Introduction

The Stories

Afterwords

Toward a New Form

A Practicum

Skippers, Snappers, and Blasters

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