This gorilla-jawed man could get a certain amount of noise-response even out of mashed potatoes, but it was when eating toast that you caught him at his best.” Call them “found tales,” or “stories embedded within larger stories,” or don’t label them at all! Just savor such golden material as: “Aunt Dahlia looked like a tomato struggling for self-expression.” Here’s another: “He had just enough intelligence to open his mouth when he wanted to eat, but certainly no more.” One more, sticking with the food theme: “The silence was broken by a crackling sound like a forest fire, as Mr. Strictly speaking, this collection of uproarious excerpts from the fiction of lauded English humorist Wodehouse does not contain stories-but if readers can forego contexts of character and setting, they can enjoy these fragments in their own right. Tony Ring (ed.), The Wit and Wisdom of P.G. Chesterton’s quip that a would-be patriot who says, “My country, right or wrong” might as well be saying “My mother, drunk or sober.” Can’t you picture that mother and her progeny?) James Richardson’s aphorisms raise the excellent question of whether pithy quotations, if flavorful enough, can qualify as short-shorts. Who says a short-short needs to be a work of fiction? Pico Iyer, Leslie Jamison, Hilton Als, Julian Barnes, Wayne Koestenbaum, Claudia Rankine, Roxane Gay, and Sven Birkerts all shine in this gathering of brief essays. Judith Kitchen and Dinah Lenney (ed.), Brief Encounters (For more mastery of the short prose poem form, read Russell Edson and C. Hailing from Ukraine, the Jewish writer Ozerov (original name: Goldberg) brings Anna Akhmatova, Shoshtakovich, Pasternak, Prokofiev, and lesser-known Soviet artistic luminaries back to life in these lovely concentrated word-portraits. And how piquant is this line from “Going”: “Once I had food poisoning and realized I was trapped inside my body”?Ī prose poem can make for a fine short-short. Hempel specializes in cogent zingers, including the one-sentence “Housewife”: “She would always sleep with her husband and with another man in the course of the same day, and then the rest of the day, for whatever was left to her of that day, she would exploit by incanting, ‘ French film, French film.’” The repetition of “day,” the emphasis on “French”-Hempel never disappoints.
I could go on, but for this list, I’ll keep my criteria short: these are works that show the diversity of the short-short form while also striking my personal fancy.
#Inshort shorts series#
Among the best of these are the Sudden Fiction series (Robert Shapard and James Thomas, editors), Flash Fiction (James Thomas, Denise Thomas, and Tom Hazuka, editors) Micro Fiction (Jerome Stern, editor), and Short Shorts (Irving Howe and Ilana Wiener Howe, editors), which features the first very short story I fell in love with, Tolstoy’s profound “Three Hermits.” The most comprehensive way to sample short-shorts is by dipping into multi-author anthologies.
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