Banshee is a print journal of exciting accessible, contemporary writing from Ireland and around the world, published twice a year – in spring and autumn – and features short stories, flash fiction, personal essays and interviews. The first issue was launched in September 2015 and Issue 3 is now available. Banshee is edited by three writers in their late 20s and early 30s, Laura Jane Cassidy, Claire Hennessy and Eimear Ryan.
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You all come from different writing backgrounds. How does that inform your experience of editing a literary journal?
Even though we write different things, there’s a lot of overlap in terms of the topics that interest us – which really becomes evident when we look at the many writers we all love. As editors we’re not really thinking as writers but as readers – it wouldn’t be helpful to think in terms of ‘what we would like to have written’ instead of ‘this is brilliant, let’s champion it!’
Read in Full
We’re delighted that renowned American flash fiction writer and teacher, Kathy Fish is judging our next award, which opens on November 1st.
Forty six stories are included in Santino Prinzi’s debut collection of flash fictions published by 
Pure Slush was established in December 2010, publishing flash fiction online for anyone who wants to read it. Moving into print publication in late 2011, what has followed includes two further imprints (Truth Serum Press and Everytime Press) and almost fifty books. There are many more to come – memoir, how-to resources, anthologies, fiction, poetry – so there is always something to like about the entire catalogue. The best words to describe Pure Slush: zesty and cosmopolitan.
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.
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. 
Michael Fitzgerald tells us more about his trip to the remoter parts of the Falkland Islands, which inspired his piece. An architect, he explains how architectural work, like writing, goes through a constantly evolving process and includes “a finite palette of components”. When writing flash fiction he says to ignore the rules and experiment, which is what he does to great effect in ‘
John Saul told us he likes interviews, reading them especially. Matching the condensed nature of flash fiction, he’s given us some brief answers to our questions. We like his one word answer – ‘read ‘ – to our question about a tip for writing flash fiction. There’s lots of opportunity for reading a variety of short-short fiction on this site. John’s commended story, ‘