Flash fiction is a brief fictional narrative[1] that still offers character and plot development. Identified varieties, many of them defined by word count, include the six-word story;[2] the 280-character story (also known as "twitterature");[3] the "dribble" (also known as the "minisaga", 50 words);[2] the "drabble" (also known as "microfiction", 100 words);[2] "sudden fiction" (750 words);[4] "flash fiction" (1,000 words); and "microstory".[5]
In the United States, early forms of flash fiction can be found in the 19th century, notably in the figures of Walt Whitman, Ambrose Bierce, and Kate Chopin.[7]
In the 1920s flash fiction was referred to as the "short short story" and was associated with Cosmopolitan magazine; and in the 1930s, collected in anthologies such as The American Short Short Story.[8]
Somerset Maugham was a notable proponent, with his Cosmopolitans: Very Short Stories (1936) being an early collection.
In Japan, flash fiction was popularized in the post-war period particularly by Michio Tsuzuki (都筑道夫).
In 1986 Jerome Stern at the Florida State University organized the World's Best Short-Short Story Contest for stories of less than 250 words. Michael Martone, the first winner, received $100 and a crate of Florida oranges as the prize.[9] The Southeast Review continues the contest but has increased the maximum to 500 words.[10] In 1996 Stern published Micro Fiction: an anthology of really short stories drawn, in part, from the contest.[11]
It was not until 1992, however, that the term "flash fiction" came into use as a category/genre of fiction.[12][13] It was coined by James Thomas,[14] who together with Denise Thomas and Tom Hazuka edited the 1992 landmark anthology titled Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories,[15] and was introduced by Thomas in his Introduction to that volume.[16][17] Since then the term has gained wide acceptance as a form, especially in the W. W. Norton Anthologies co-edited by Thomas: Flash Fiction America (W.W. Norton & Co., 2023), Flash Fiction International (W.W. Norton & Co., 2015), Flash Fiction Forward (W.W. Norton & Co., 2006), and Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories (W.W. Norton & Co., 1992).
Hemingway also wrote 18 pieces of flash fiction that were included in his first short-story collection, In Our Time (1925). It is disputed whether (to win a bet), as alleged, he also wrote the flash fiction "For Sale, Baby Shoes, Never Worn".[22]
Also notable are the 62 "short-shorts" which comprise Severance, the thematic collection by Robert Olen Butler in which each story describes the remaining 90 seconds of conscious awareness within human heads which have been decapitated.[23]
The Italian writer Italo Calvino consciously searched for a short narrative form, drawing inspiration from Argentine writers Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares and finding that Monterroso's was "the most perfect he could find"; "El dinosaurio", in turn, possibly inspired his "The Dinosaurs".[25]
The Arabic-speaking world has produced a number of microstory authors, including the Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz, whose book Echoes of an Autobiography is composed mainly of such stories. Other flash fiction writers in Arabic include Zakaria Tamer, Haidar Haidar, and Laila al-Othman.
Hungarian writer István Örkény is known (beside other works) for his One-Minute Stories.[27]
Print journals
A number of print journals dedicate themselves to flash fiction. These include Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine.[28]
Online journals
Access to the Internet has enhanced an awareness of flash fiction, with online journals being devoted entirely to the style. SmokeLong Quarterly, founded by Dave Clapper in 2003, is "dedicated to bringing the best flash fiction to the web ... whether written by widely published authors or those new to the craft."[29] Other online flash fiction journals include Flash Me Magazine (founded in 2003), Every Day Fiction (founded in 2007), Flash Fiction Online (founded in 2007), wigleaf (founded in 2008) and Flash Fiction Magazine (founded in 2014), not to mention The Webby Award recognized Dribble Drabble Review, founded and edited by Keith Hoerner, MFA.[30]
In a CNN article on the subject, the author remarked that the "democratization of communication offered by the Internet has made positive in-roads" in the specific area of flash fiction, and directly influenced the style's popularity.[31] The form is popular, with most online literary journals now publishing flash fiction.
In the summer of 2017, The New Yorker began running a series of flash fiction stories online every summer.[32]
Prose poetry is poetry written in prose form instead of verse form, while preserving poetic qualities such as heightened imagery, parataxis, and emotional effects.
Aleksander Głowacki, better known by his pen name Bolesław Prus, was a Polish novelist, a leading figure in the history of Polish literature and philosophy, as well as a distinctive voice in world literature.
"Mold of the Earth" is one of the shortest micro-stories by the Polish writer Bolesław Prus.
"Shades" is one of Bolesław Prus' shortest micro-stories. Written in 1885, it comes from a several years' period of pessimism in the author's life caused partly by the 1883 failure of Nowiny (News), a Warsaw daily that he had been editing less than a year. Prus, the "lamplighter" who had striven to dispel darkness and its attendant "fear, errancy, and crime," had failed to sufficiently interest the public in his "observatory of societal facts," Nowiny.
Pharaoh is the fourth and last major novel by the Polish writer Bolesław Prus (1847–1912). Composed over a year's time in 1894–95, serialized in 1895–96, and published in book form in 1897, it was the sole historical novel by an author who had earlier disapproved of historical novels on the ground that they inevitably distort history.
Christopher Kasparek is a Scottish-born writer of Polish descent who has translated works by numerous Polish authors, including Ignacy Krasicki, Bolesław Prus, Florian Znaniecki, Władysław Tatarkiewicz, Marian Rejewski, and Władysław Kozaczuk, as well as the Polish–Lithuanian Constitution of 3 May 1791.
"A Legend of Old Egypt" is a seven-page short story by Bolesław Prus, originally published January 1, 1888, in New Year's supplements to the Warsaw Kurier Codzienny and Tygodnik Ilustrowany. It was his first piece of historical fiction and later served as a preliminary sketch for his only historical novel, Pharaoh (1895), which would be serialized in the Illustrated Weekly.
The Doll is the second of four acclaimed novels by the Polish writer Bolesław Prus. It was composed for periodical serialization in 1887–1889 and appeared in book form in 1890.
The Outpost was the first of four major novels by the Polish writer Bolesław Prus. The author, writing in a Poland that had been partitioned a century earlier by Russia, Prussia and Austria, sought to bring attention to the plight of rural Poland, which had to contend with poverty, ignorance, neglect by the country's upper crust, and colonization by German settlers backed by Otto von Bismarck's German government.
The Wieliczka Salt Mine is a salt mine in the town of Wieliczka, near Kraków in southern Poland.
"Fading Voices" is an 1883 short story by the Polish writer Bolesław Prus, the leading representative of Realism in 19th-century Polish literature.
Joan Silber is an American novelist and short story writer. She won the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction and the 2018 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her novel Improvement.
Sherrie Flick is an American fiction writer whose work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, Quarterly West, Puerto del Sol, Weave Magazine, Quick Fiction, Lit Hub, and other literary magazines. Flick is also a regular contributor to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which publishes her column "In a Writer's Urban Garden." In 2021, her work was performed by actress Marin Ireland for Symphony Space.
Damian Dressick is an American author from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
A minisaga, mini saga or mini-saga is a short story based on a long story. It should contain exactly 50 words, plus a title of up to 15 characters. However, the title requirement is not always enforced and sometimes eliminated altogether. Minisagas are alternately known as microstories, ultra-shorts stories, or fifty-word stories.
The Temple of the Sibyl is a colonnaded round monopteral temple-like structure at Puławy, Poland, built at the turn of the 19th century as a museum by Izabela Czartoryska.
Mitch Berman is an American fiction writer known for his imaginative range, exploration of characters beyond the margins of society, lush prose style and dark humor.
Micro-SFP (µSFP) describes an ultra-short science-fiction story written for the specific purpose of capturing inventive ideas for product or service innovations. It is a combination of three concepts, first science-fiction prototyping, second flash fiction and finally, Twitter and texting.
Grant Faulkner is an American writer, the former executive director of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), the co-founder of the online literary journal 100 Word Story, the co-host of the podcast Write-minded, and an Executive Producer of America's Next Great Author.
100 Word Story is a literary magazine that was founded in 2011 by writers Grant Faulkner and Lynn Mundell in Berkeley, California. It publishes stories and essays that are exactly 100 words in length ; each piece is published with an accompanying photo.
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