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Bare Ana and Other Stories
Robert Shapard’s exquisitely crafted short stories take readers to enchantingly peculiar realms: A young girl poignantly rejects immortality in favor of love. A startling revelation confronts a son who discovers his father’s head is only a burlap sack with piercing Marks-A-Lot eyes. A couple in their early 30s engage in sex role-play involving the destruction of Mars. A young woman valet parker at an all-night diner in Los Angeles is ensnared by the world’s most famous monster. A boy’s life is irrevocably altered by witnessing a Mexican family’s farm-truck accident. An old, hungover science professor imparts the Earth’s greatest secret to his students. The stories are not merely an escape into the surreal but also delve into the human experience. Interwoven throughout is the delicate balance between mortality and love, the intersection of reality and fantasy, the transformative power of unexpected events, and the perennial quest for meaning. The compelling and thought-provoking collection beckons readers to explore the depths of their own existence and embrace the extraordinary within the ordinary.
Most of the following books are Flash Fiction or Sudden Fiction anthologies. For the curious: What is the difference between the two? Sudden and Flash are siblings. Sudden was born first and the first Flash came six years after. Suddens can be longer than flashes, but 2/3 of the stories in the original Sudden Fiction are in fact flash length, and some are even micros. Confusing? Let’s just say this: Sudden, flash, or micro, they’re all very short stories.
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Flash Fiction International
What is flash fiction called in other countries? In Latin America it is a micro, in Denmark kortprosa, in Bulgaria mikro razkaz. Flash has always––and everywhere––been a form of experiment, of possibility. This collection includes 86 of the most beautiful, provocative, and moving narratives by authors from six continents.
“These sometimes brilliant, often cunning, always intriguing very short stories fit the moment, the Web, the world we live in now … it’s a remarkable and remarkably readable collection.”––Frederick Barthelme, editor of New World Writing Quarterly
“These bursts of illumination … establish flash fiction on a global scale. An incomparable set of stories, this book is a new landmark anthology for the very short story form.”––Jane Ciabattari, BBC book columnist
Available ON AMAZON
Sudden Fiction
AMERICAN SHORT-SHORT STORIES
You can read the introduction to this original book in the Sudden and Flash Fiction literary movement in the Articles section of this website.
“We who love prose fiction love these miniature tales both to read and to write because they are so finite; so highly compressed and highly charged.”––Joyce Carol Oates
“People who like to skip can’t skip in a three-page story.”––Grace Paley
“It can do in a page what a novel does in two hundred. It covers years in less time, time in almost no time. It wants to deliver us to where we were before we began. Its aim is restorative, to keep us young.”––Mark Strand
“This collection represents the richness and variety of American writers. The 70 pieces themselves—highly compressed, often tantalizing—display a multiplicity of modes and derive from a variety of traditions.” Publishers Weekly
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Sudden Fiction Latino
SHORT SHORT STORIES FROM THE UNITED STATES AND LATIN AMERICA
“In this world of electro speed, these fine editors catch the zip and flow of the short-short story from the New World”––Alan Cheuse, National Public Radio
Highly awarded fiction writer and poet Ray Gonzalez joins Robert Shapard and James Thomas in gathering new and classic stories from Latin American and U.S. Latino writers including Junot Díaz, Roberto Bolaño, Daniel Alarcón, Gabrel Garcia Márquez, Andrea Saenz, Jorge Luis Borges, Sandra Cisneros, Isabel Allende, Pedro Ponce, and Luis Alberto Urrea, with an introduction by Argentina’s Luisa Valenzuela.
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Sudden Fiction International
“Charles Baxter’s liberating introduction alone is worth the price of admission. These tales can make you laugh, cry, and even feel exalted in the space of ten minutes.”––Rick DeMarinis
“I relished the concept, tasted the fare, and enjoyed a multi-cultural feast. My thanks for giving us so many wonderful voices in an accessible and delightful presentation. They’re perfect bedtime reading.”––Amy Tan
“This book pulses with the flare of fiction breaking out—a book of light, of lightning.”––Frederick Busch
“In this cosmopolitan range of sensibilities, known authors such as Atwood, Colette, Borges, Dinesen, Lessing, and Calvino are joined by those we should know and will want to know better.”––DeWitt Henry
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Flash Fiction Forward
After the publication of the first Flash Fiction anthology over a decade ago, “flash” became part of the creative-writing lexicon for readers, writers, students, and teachers. In this follow-up collection, the editors once again tackle the questions: “How short can a story be and truly be a story?” Over and over, these stories prove that less is often more.
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New Sudden Fiction
SHORT SHORT STORIES FROM AMERICA AND BEYOND
Responding to America’s love for short-short stories, editors Robert Shapard and James Thomas searched thousands of books and magazines to select these sixty stories, traditional, experimental, humorous, moving, and magical. In the process they discovered both new talents and a wealth of celebrated writers.
“It’s a test of a reader’s ability to fly.”––Charles Baxter
OUT OF PRINT
Motel & Other Stories
WINNER OF THE PREDATOR PRESS NATIONAL CHAPBOOK COMPETITION
Some of these stories appear in Bare Ana and Other Stories in revised and edited versions.
Robert Shapard 