Had a couple things published in a friend's e-zine.

Post Reply New Topic

The internet and social media have created opportunities for flash to become accessible, but although its current popularity is new, the form is not. It can be found in oral traditions, parables, the myths in the Iliad and Odyssey, Aesop’s fables, the fables of the Middle East, and fairytales. Petronius wrote short-short stories in ancient Rome. Marie de France wrote them in medieval times. The form became established in the nineteenth century through such writers as Balzac and De Maupassant in France, Chekov in Russia and Walt Whitman, Ambrose Bierce and Kate Chopin in the USA. Major practitioners of the twentieth century were Franz Kafka in Prague, O. Henry in the USA, Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar in Argentina, Robert Walser in Switzerland, Dino Buzzati and Italo Calvino in Italy, Isak Dinesen in Denmark and Yasumari Kawabata in Japan who was famous for his ‘palm-of-the-hand’ stories. By the 1920s the form was referred to as the short-short story and was associated with Cosmopolitan magazine. Ernest Hemingway, known best for his novels of heroism and adventure such as For whom the Bell Tolls, wrote 18 pieces of very short fiction that were included in his short story collection In Our Time. The six-word flash, ‘For sale, baby shoes never worn’ is attributed to him, allegedly written as a dare to write a complete story in as few words as possible. In the 1930s, short-shorts were collected in anthologies such as The American short story. Somerset Maugham was a practitioner with his Cosmopolitans: Very short stories. Others have included Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut. In 1947, the editors of Writers try short shorts, Mildred I. Reid and Delmar E. Bordeaux, traced the origin of the modern short-short to Collier’s Weekly, an American popular magazine that in 1925 claimed to have invented it.

In the introduction to his 1983 anthology, Sudden Fiction, Robert Shapard described the difficulty the editorial team had in agreeing on a title. Because almost no literary criticism existed to properly name the form, he asked the writers to do so, stating: “the form can only be established when its proper name is chosen. We create our world through language, through naming.” Writer Robert Kelly used the term sudden fiction because the stories “are all suddenly – just there”. Thus, the name of the anthology came into being. James Thomas titled his 1992 anthology, Flash Fiction: Seventy two very short stories. He stated that the editors’ definition of flash fiction was a story that would fit on two facing pages of a literary magazine.

Oh, I like them so much! Thank you for posting them here.