Reviews

Hint Fiction: An Anthology of Stories in 25 Words or Fewer
Edited by Robert Swartwood
Reviewed by Santino Prinzi

hint-fiction Hint Fiction (W.W. Norton & Company, 2010) is, as the title suggests, an anthology of fiction where each story is 25 words or fewer. There are 125 stories to be found in this anthology, divided across three broad themes: life and death; love and hate; this and that, which entails any story that fails to fit into the first two categories. The anthology boasts a series of celebrated writers, such as Joyce Carol Oates, Gay Degani, Stuart Dybek, among others. Robert Shapard, the editor of numerous flash fiction anthologies who has provided his views on the reverse of this anthology, believes that “some of these stories suggest entire novels in just a few words,” and, as became clear on reading, these stories really are microcosms of universes that become apparent once the penny drops.
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Songs Without Music by Tim Stevenson
Reviewed by Santino Prinzi

Songs Without Music (Gumbo Press, 2016) is the third fiction collection from Tim Stevenson. He is a first prize winner of the National Flash Fiction Day Micro Competition, has had his fiction published widely in magazines, anthologies, and online, and is judging this year’s Bridport Flash Fiction Prize.

The collection is presented with the by-line “flash-fictions and curiosities”, which is an accurate and all-encompassing description for Songs Without Music; we have flash, haiku, centipieces, and other forms possibly eluding definition. Not only are there different forms of fiction but different genres too, making for a collection that invigorates the imagination and provides a varied, thought-provoking reading experience.
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Stronger Faster Shorter
Flash Fictions by David Swann
Review by Jeanette Sheppard

The twenty-five flash fictions in Stronger Faster Shorter Flash Fictions (Flash: The International Short-Short Story Press, 2015) form a chronological narrative spanning a boy’s childhood in the 1970’s to adulthood. Each flash provides a sense of the narrator inviting the reader to peer into the past and experience the emotional truth of ‘our world, up the M6’ (as termed in Butlins with Books). Sometimes the narrator looks back with a measured eye, at other times he is rummaging in the past rediscovering people and places that recall further memories and provoke reflection.

There is a nostalgic quality throughout as the narrator shines a flashlight on a multitude of emotionally resonant characters including: a singing alcoholic, a goat murderer, a spoon playing war veteran, CB radio hams, pigeon fanciers, a university student, war survivors, a burned man on a bus and an ex-lover’s friend.
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Hometown by Carrie Etter
Reviewed by Santino Prinzi

Hometown (V.Press, 2016) is the debut fiction pamphlet from the poet, lecturer, and critic Carrie Etter, whose most recent collection, Imagined Sons (Seren, 2014), was shortlisted for the 2014 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry by The Poetry Society.

The collection explores the lives of characters living in the American Midwest and is divided into two sections, with the second section detailing “the aftermath of a white man’s accidental killing of a black man in central Illinois” in a series of flashes. For this reviewer, the perfect flash is a complete story in itself, can be read quickly, but remains in the mind of the reader long after an initial reading, the type of flash you read and have to step away from the text so you can recover; if you’re looking for a collection of flashes that do exactly this then look no further.
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Bystanders by Tara Laskowski
Reviewed by Eileen Merriman

This month I’ve had the pleasure to read Bystanders, a compelling collection of short stories by writer, columnist, and editor of SmokeLong Quarterly, Tara Laskowski.

Bystanders is an apt title. A bystander, by definition, is a person who is present at an event or incident but does not take part. This is the theme running through the stories in this collection, whether it be a woman who becomes obsessively sympathetic to the driver involved in a hit-and-run; a new mother whose baby monitor shows her a chilling truth; a house-hunting couple whose relationship has recently been tested by an affair; or an investigative reporter whose alias likes to ‘ruin other people’s careers.’
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Collaboration:
A review of Rift by Kathy Fish & Robert Vaughan

rift In Rift, stories by Kathy Fish and Robert Vaughan, published in 2015 by Unknown Press, lovers of flash fiction have a new Must Read, a new entry to the list of flash fiction classics that show the power and depth possible in stories compressed into a page or two.

Even the one-word, four-letter title conveys more than the sum of its parts. As a noun, rift means a break in something. A crack. A split. A flaw. A breach. A fracture. A cavity. An opening. A serious division in friendly relations.

The book Rift contains four escalating sections: Fault, Tremor, Breach, and Cataclysm. Each section has around eighteen stories that alternate between writers.

The table of contents is the only place Read in Full

Bath Flash Fiction Award

International Rolling Flash Fiction Competition