The Best Small Fictions 2018 - Softcover

Aimee Bender; Guest Editor; Sherrie Flick; Series Editor

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0998966770 ISBN 13: 9780998966779

Publisher: Braddock Avenue Books, 2018

Synopsis

The Best Small Fictions is the first contemporary anthology solely devoted to honoring the best short hybrid fiction published in a calendar year. The series, which began in 2015, has featured an international group of both seasoned and emerging authors who work in flash, micro fiction, prose poetry, haibun, and other hybrid forms. Tara L. Masih founded this annual series and now serves as consulting editor. For our 2018 edition, we welcomed Sherrie Flick as series editor and Pushcart Prize winning author Aimee Bender as guest editor. This latest edition includes 53 works by writers such as Lydia Davis, Rumaan Alam, Diane Williams, Kathy Fish, Matt Bell, Aleksandar Hemon, Maxim Loskutoff, Michael Parker, Meg Pokrass, Deb Olin Unferth, and Desiree Cooper. Past guest editors have included Pulitzer Prize winning author Robert Olen Butler (2015), PEN/Malamud Award winner and O. Henry Prize winner Stuart Dybek (2016), Rea Award and PEN/Malamud Award winner Amy Hempel (2017).

About this title

About the Author:

Aimee Bender is the author of five books including The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, a NY Times Notable Book of 1998, international bestseller The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, and most recently The Color Master, which was a NY Times Notable Book of 2013. Her work has been published in Granta, GQ, The Paris Review, McSweeney's, Tin House, and more, as well as heard on This American Life and Selected Shorts. She has been translated into sixteen languages. When in graduate school at University of California Irvine, she often turned in two stories because she was so interested in the shorter form (and at that point didn't write much that was longer); this turned out to be invaluable, because it allowed the workshop to point her towards the better work, which was not always obvious. Her first published short short, The Rememberer was printed in The Missouri Review, a journal she had tried for years and years. She teaches creative writing at University of Southern California, and lives in Los Angeles with her family. Sherrie Flick is the author of the novel Reconsidering Happiness, the flash fiction chapbook I Call This Flirting, and the short story collection Whiskey, Etc.,winner of the Foreword INDIES bronze prize and named one of Entropy's Best Fiction Books of 2016. Her fiction has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Ploughshares, SmokeLong Quarterly, and W.W. Norton's Flash Fiction Forward, New Sudden Fiction, and New Micro. She has received grants and fellowships from Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, The Heinz Endowments, Sewanee Writers' Conference, Ucross, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She works as a freelance writer and teaches in the Food Studies and MFA programs at Chatham University.

Review:

The best of these fictional vignettes are like a splash of ice water in the face. Wake up, they shout, your life is unspooling. They create their emotional effects with a quick windup and a powerful release, often a final, lingering image. --~Harvard Review

In this extraordinary collection of small fictions...readers are gifted with stories that slap wings onto their backs or drop anchors into their hearts, oftentimes both. --~The Small Press Book Review

[T]he beauty of an anthology such as this, pulling together the best of the form, is that you will always encounter something new, something different, something that pushes the boundaries of flash further than before. If this anthology proves nothing else, it is that small fiction in all its forms continues to go from strength to strength, as does the series itself. --~Bath Flash Fiction Award

About this edition

• Publisher: Braddock Avenue Books
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0998966770
• ISBN 13: 9780998966779
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 152