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Overview
How short can a story be and still truly be a story? This volume of seventy-two very short fictions, none much more than 750 words in length, demonstrates to our repeated satisfaction that less can be more, small can stand tall, and the diminutive can be dynamically and dramatically complete. Here for enjoyment and study are very short pieces by acknowledged modern masters--including Raymond Carver, Richard Brautigan, Margaret Atwood, Julio Cortazar and Tim O'Brien--as well as fiction by newer talents, who have embraced the short form with much gusto and considerable grace. With a rich variety of stories and authors, subjects and styles and sensibilities, these flashes of fiction make for eclectic--and often electric-- reading. The volume is a must for readers and writers, indeed for anyone interested in the finely sharpened edge of contemporary literature.Synopsis
"These stories are not merely flashes in the pan; there's pay dirt here!" —DeWitt Henry, editor of Ploughshares
Publishers Weekly
In this collection of 72 previously published stories--none longer than 750 words--Raymond Carver, Luisa Valenzuela, Margaret Atwood and John Updike mingle with talented lesser knowns to form a marvelously varied bouquet. Bruce Holland Rogers describes a man who pours his unrequited love into a poem comparing his beloved's thunderously exhilarating effect on him to ``the Burlington Northern southbound out of Fort Collins.'' In Julia Alvarez's tale, set during the Cuban missile crisis, a young immigrant girl panics when she spots deadly fallout--until she learns it is snow, each flake unique, like a person. A man looking at an old photo of his parents sees not the second of promise captured on paper but the tragic consequences 20 years in the future, in Paul Lisicky's work. And Allan Gurganus's narrator shows that ``despite persistent rumors to the contrary, my grandfather did not die driving a Toyota across his pond'' in an attempt to prove the excellence of this car, for which he had conceived a bizarre passion. Savor this collection one minute at a time. James Thomas and Denise Thomas edit The Best of the West series; Hazuka is fiction editor of Quarterly West . (July)