by Susan Rukeyser | May 22, 2012 | Of Literary Interest, Writing
The short story is a sit-down dinner. It opens with an amuse-bouche to stimulate the salivary glands. Then comes a parade of flavors and textures, each adding a layer of understanding: the bitter crunch of melancholy, velvety arousal, tough and chewy survival, sharp...
by Simon Kearns | May 21, 2012 | Of Literary Interest, Writing
The novel is a painting. The short story, a sketch. Flash fiction is a photograph, and, as we know, worth a thousand words. Personally, I prefer a word count between 200 and 500. I like flash fiction that plays with form, that turns the reading into a game. In my own...
by Sarah Malone | May 10, 2012 | Of Literary Interest, Writing
With stories whose endings are visible from the first sentence, or inferable from the length of web browser scrollbars, I don’t release my awareness of real time as I do with narratives long enough to settle into an illusion of merging with them. Instead I become...
by Marcus Speh | May 9, 2012 | Of Literary Interest, Writing
It is well known that the short story was invented by the Man in the Moon for two important reasons worth reminding ourselves of no matter where we live or what we’re made of: the first is that the Man in the Moon always found it difficult to finish a novel because of...
by Kevin Catalano | May 8, 2012 | Of Literary Interest, Writing
Jayne Anne Phillips, a former writing instructor of mine at Rutgers-Newark, and a fantastic writer of the short form, referred to the “flash” piece as “one-page fiction.” (She made these pieces famous in her impossibly good Black Tickets.) I don’t think she liked the...
