The Best Small Fictions: 2019 Anthology

The Best Small Fictions anthology, now in its fifth year, presents one hundred and forty-­six pristinely crafted pieces from an array of authors representing twenty-­six nations and six continents. These short, elliptical works are varied and edgy, sorrowful and triumphant, provocative and visionary. The small fictions enclosed within this volume are always vibrant. They scintillate. They linger. With each story brief enough to savor at a stoplight or quick coffee break, the tales contained within 2019's The Best Small Fictions promise to leave a mark.

"Consistently the best of the annual award volumes in the genre - and this year is the most boundless, reaping "national flash fiction days" across the globe and across time, from small historical fictions to an Akutagawa classic to experiments with every form. A who's who of authors, presses, and journals, Best Small Fictions is the one book you should buy in the genre this year if you could buy only one."

- Robert Shapard, co-editor of Flash Fiction International

"This is an excellent selection of flash fiction from expert practitioners at the top of their game. The works selected here demonstrate the power of this extremely short form, each tiny piece of text leaving an imprint on the reader much bigger than its original size. At times they appear to work together with the others, forming a single constellation of beauty and stillness."

- David Gaffney, author of All the Places I've Ever Lived and Sawn-Off Tales

"Brilliant, incendiary, incandescent, these tiny stories capture worlds both intimate and universal. Give this book to anyone who says flash fiction doesn't go deep. This newest volume of Best Small Fictions demonstrates once and for all that flash fiction writers are the Ginger Rogers of the literary world, accomplishing all that novelists and short story writers do, only backwards and in high heels."

- Kathy Fish, author of Wild Life: Collected Works

"An outstanding collection. From a newly translated piece by Akatugawa, to my mind one of the greatest story writers of all time, to current favorites like Carmen Machado and Jacob Appel - and many others I needed to know and now do - this book has remarkable range. And is proof, if we needed it, that the more compact the force, the more powerful the blow."

Peter Orner, author of Maggie Brown & Others