The Ocean of Story by Shannon Reed
Flash Fiction America:
73 Very Short Stories
by James Thomas (Editor), Sherrie Flick (Editor), John Dufresne (Editor, Florida International University)
W.W. Norton
304 pages
If a novel is a deep dive down into the ocean of story, flash fiction is often a jump into a swimming hole: short, sharp, brisk, done. Even when engulfed, you can see the pond walls and river banks. The water might be warm, or cold, or filled with life. You might even touch bottom.
Flash Fiction America, a new anthology of the form from W. W. Norton, and edited by flash experts James Thomas, Sherrie Flick, and John Dufresne, presents 73 distinct swimming holes: very short stories, from writers who are masters of the form: Lydia Davis, Joy Castro, Kathy Fish, Aimee Bender, Amy Hempel…the list goes on and on (and on even more, because with flash, you can fit a whole river system’s worth of swimming holes in a book). It’s the latest in a series of flash fiction collections edited by Thomas; the first appeared in 1992. This one focuses on work from American and underrepresented writers.
In “Not Daniel,” Deesha Philyaw needs only a few pages to reveal both the sizzle and the sadness in an affair taking place in the backseat of a car. In Bonnie Joe Campbell’s “The Solution to Brian’s Problem,” the titular character tries and tries to help, or at least handle, his wife, Connie, who abuses meth. In “Grey,” Bergita Bugarija’s heroine experiences glimpses and tries to understand modern art, despite her skepticism. Each of these stories, and the 70 more, are captivating, revealing and brief. As the author Danielle Evans writes in her forward to the book, we recognize as we read “the familiar compression of the short story in a piece of flash fiction, the way the shadow of the past and the urgency of the present and the weight of the future hover there all at once, bringing the reader into and then beyond the story.”
Cold, warm, alive, remote, deep, shallow: whatever quality each story brings readers, the dives – all 73 of them – are worth the leap. Let the water envelop you before you emerge, changed, ever so slightly, by the flash of story.
Shannon Reed is a professor of creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh, and the author of Why Did I Get a B? And Other Mysteries We're Discussing in the Faculty Lounge, and the forthcoming Why We Read: Our Lifelong Love Affair with Books.