Sudden Fiction: American Short-short Stories

(Paperback, Reprint)

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"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

Author Bio

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.