Best Small Fictions 2023

Best Small Fictions is the first-ever contemporary anthology solely dedicated to anthologizing the best internationally published short hybrid fiction in a given calendar year. Inaugurated with the 2015 edition, the series features the best microfiction, flash fiction, haibun stories, and prose poetry from around the world.

From the 2023 introduction by guest editor Catherine McNamara:
This is a vast menagerie of potent works, ranging from the complexities of fish bone ingestion to the murderous insouciance of mermaids. As a whole, there is a feeling that our world is suffering, our family bonds are constricted and rueful, we still long to satisfy/break from our parents; some of us have been uprooted or span the friction between cultures; women are at risk, in frequent danger, defenseless—until they collude and fight back. There is an arduous search for love and its sustenance, the flux of depression and the nearby presence of the dead, as well as an unexpected abundance of wolves. There is often an awareness of the rifts between our inner and outer realities, and our helplessness as we traverse between the two. In all, this is a bold, sumptuous array of contexts where I found true representations of realities that were dented, pulled out of shape, crystallizing, captivating.

Content Warning: coming soon

2023 Selections

“A Man on the Street Offers Me a Cooked Shrimp” by Andrea Frazier / Lost Balloon *
“In the Museums of Heaven and Hell” by Goldie Goldbloom / Lascaux Review / Bridport Prize Anthology *
“Spearing Sturgeon by Torchlight” by Summer J. Hart / Jet Fuel Review *
“Scorpion” by Hilal Isler / The Baltimore Review *
“Amelia Earhart Knew Seven Latin Words for Fire” by Joe Kapitan / New Flash Fiction Review *
“Three Reincarnation Rituals” by Lilian Liang / Asian American Writers’ Workshop *
“The Picnic” by Nathan Alling Long / The Masters Review *
“Murder Mermaids Make Mistakes” by Sandra Schmuhl Long / Electric Literature *
“Four Pages” by Ogochukwu Ogbonna / Lolwe *
“My Sister’s Monkey” by Michelle Ross / Laurel Review *
“How Your Life Becomes a Reluctant Endorsement for Little Trees Air Fresheners” by Barlow Adams / The Bureau Dispatch
“Grave Robin” by Fahad Al-Amoudi / Brunel International African Poetry Prize
“Things That Won’t Stay Swallowed” by Evan Michael Anderson / JMWW
“Birthday Portrait, Son” by Valerie Bacharach / Ilanot Review
“Summer of ’76” by Sudha Balagopal / The Maine Review
“You Wish This Were a Novel” by Matt Barrett / The Baltimore Review
“Flux” by Patricia Q. Bidar / Newfound
“… For a Black Girl” by Janine Blue / The Forge Literary Magazine
“Signs” by Lucie Bonvalet / Sand Literary Journal
“Necessary Measures” by Gerri Brightwell / Litro
“Between” by Madeline Byrne / Bath Flash Fiction Award
“Morse Code” by Elizabeth Cabrera / New Flash Fiction Review
“The Day We Watched the Seagull Eat the Eel” by Eve Cantler / Washington Writers’ Publishing House Writes
“Yesterday, They Crossed the Elbe” by Jelle Cauwenberghs / Bridport Prize Anthology
“Blue-Orange” by Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar / Pithead Chapel
“Heirloom” by Vincent Chavez / Wigleaf
“Baptized” by Dan Crawley / Roi Fainéant Press
“The Many Uses of a Banyan Tree” by Subhravanu Das / Chestnut Review
“Say Hi” by Shome Dasgupta / Reckon Review
“The Silence” by Jessica Denzer / West Trade Review
“To Have Fought” by Devaki Devay / Peatsmoke Journal
“Fish Woman Sea” by C. J. Erick / Brilliant Flash Fiction
“Chicago” by Kathy Fish / Wigleaf
“To the Shortage of Lifeguards That Will Live in This Rill” by Pat Foran / Pithead Chapel
“If I Plant You” by Brian Franklin / The Masters Review
“Rivers” by Avital Gad-Cykman / Barzakh
“Déjà Vu” by Patricia Garcia Lujan / Atticus Review
“Persephone” by Amina Lolita Gautier / New Millennium Writings
“Intermezzo” by Marie Gethins / Reflex Fiction
“Calf” by Matt Goldberg / Porter House Review
“Fish Bone” by Renny Gong / Split Lip Magazine
“Trout Prince” by Rachel Gough / National Flash Fiction Day Press
“The Last Fall” by Linda Grierson-Irish / Flash Frontier
“For the First Time” by Insha R. Hamdani / So to Speak Journal
“Tell Me Why It Was Bad to Execute Myself” by Charlotte Hamrick / New World Writing Quarterly
“The Inner Organs of Beasts and Fowls” by Jenna Heller / Breach of All Size: Small Stories on Ulysses, Love, and Venice
“Descending Borobudur” by Sara Hills / Scrawl Place
“Rats and Cats and Snakes” by Dustin M. Hoffman / Necessary Fiction
“A Theory of Doors” by Kristen Holt-Browning / Hayden’s Ferry Review
“The Boy from Cave City, Kentucky (A Wreath of Sourgrass) by Jonathan Humphrey / Contemporary Haibun Online
“Wordafterwordafterwordafterword” by Penn Javdan / Bending Genres
“Nesting Dolls” by Meagan Johanson / Pidgeonholes
“Dream Daughter Under a Moonless Night” by Malvika Jolly / Salt Hill Journal
“Rainfall in December” by Ikechukwu Kaine / Brittle Paper
“Goodwill” by Naomi Kanakia / American Short Fiction
“Anna Walinska” by Arthur Kayzakian / Cincinnati Review
“Love in the Knots of the Coptic Stitch” by Beth Kephart / The Gravity of the Thing
“Haibun for Learning 中文 on Duolingo” by Saba Keramati / Quarterly West
“Cheongsam Woman, Still Trapped in the Forties” by Meiko Ko / Longleaf Review
“Ode to Zheka” by Olga Krause, t. Chana Toth-Sewell / Your Impossible Voice
“Feeding on the Thamirabarani Metro” by M. L. Krishnan / Fractured Lit
“For What May Still Be There” by Babak Lakghomi / The Adroit Journal
“Tuesday, Taking on Water” by Virginia Laurie / Capsule Stories: Into the Light
“Cherry-Pit Dreams” by Ra’Niqua Lee / SoFloPoJo (Southern Florida Poetry Journal)
“How to Tell a Story” by Hege A. Jakobsen Lepri / Atticus Review
“Guangxi56” by Eliot Li / Atticus Review
“Some Humanity Still” by Su-Yee Lin / Quarterly West
“Skin and Bone” by Melissa Llanes Brownlee / Astrolabe
“The Triaminic Man” by Lorette C. Luzajic / MacQueen’s Quinterly
“Flight Path” by Fiona J. Mackintosh / Flash Flood Journal
“My Grandfather’s Riddle” by Michael Martone / Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana
“We Beasts” by Will McMillan / Cheap Pop Lit
“Something Tribal This Way Comes” by Moata McNamara / At the Bay | I Te Kokoru
“Wishing We Were Anywhere but the High School Swimming Pool” by Alejandra Medina / Capsule Stories: Swimming
“Deep” by Chloe Yelena Miller / The Citron Review
“07:15 Fast Local” by Hema Nataraju / Five South
“We Come Easily to the Language of Horror” by James Norcliffe / Flash Frontier | Letter to ʻOumuamua
“A Mouth Filled with White” by Emmanuel Nwafor / Apple Valley Review
“In This Tale of a Suburban Tiger, the Part of the Mother Is Played by a Bird” by Gillian O’Shaughnessy / Splonk
“Wuthering” by Muhammed Olowonjoyin / Brittle Paper
“Sorrow Everywhere” by Pamela Painter / SoFloPoJo (Southern Florida Poetry Journal)
“3 Visitations” by Kim Parko / Salt Hill Journal
“Every Greener Summer” by Edie Patterson / No Tokens
“We’re Not Weird about It” by Kasey Payette / Waterstone Review
“Mi Corazón Quiere Cantar Así” by J. J. Peña / Fractured Lit
“The Sluagh” by Kendra Marie Pintor / Craft Literary Review
“Eddie” by David James Poissant / Ghost Parachute
“If You Want to Be Loved, Love” by Meg Pokrass / Cleaver
“A Living” by K. A. Polzin / Apple Valley Review
“I Saw a Bird Die Today” by Chizi Pswarayi / Kalahari Review
“The Problem with Mutability” by Charles Rafferty / The Southern Review
“A Succession of Silences” by Electra Rhodes / Books Ireland Magazine
“1,000” by Rob Roensch / Okay Donkey
“More than a Lion” by Kiran Kaur Saini / The Forge Literary Magazine
“Still Life with Conch Shell” by Jasmine Sawers / The Anchored World
“Air Show” by Curtis Smith / JMWW
“Primaries” by Sarp Sozdinler / The Lumiere Review
“Does the Pig?” by Nick Story / Hex Literary
“Togetherland” by Amy Stuber / Okay Donkey
“Love Story” by Kaj Tanaka / Fairy Tale Review
“Dream of the Ploughed Field” by Lisabelle Tay / Sine Theta Magazine
“An Unrequited Love Letter to the City That Murdered Me” by Phoenix Tesni / Renaissance Review
“Origin of a Face” by Eileen Frankel Tomarchio / Milk Candy Review
“Monologue to a Tattoo Artist” by Eric Scot Tryon / Cease, Cows
“Swooning for Succulents” by Addie Tsai / Alocasia
“Hula” by Heidi Turner / 805 Lit
“Fangs” by Tara Isabel Zambrano / Craft Literary Review
“We Don’t Say ‘I Love You’ in This Family” by Lucy Zhang / Whale Road Review
“Orangery” by Tola Zysman / The Adroit Journal

*Top 10 spotlighted story selections, chosen by guest editor Catherine McNamara.

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• Anthology | Fiction | Flash | Hybrid
• 5.5” x 8.5” Perfectbound Trade Paperback
• 5.5” x 8.5” Hardcover with Dust Jacket
• Cream Paper, 272 Pages
• Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-946580-46-7
• Paperback ISBN-10: 1-946580-46-5
• Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-1-946580-47-4
• Hardcover ISBN-10: 1-946580-47-3
• Ebook ISBN-13: 978-1-946580-48-1
• Ebook ISBN-10: 1-946580-48-1
• LCCN: 2023951476
• First Edition: December 12, 2023
• Short URL: TK
• Permalink
• Read Excerpt Sample TK
• Download Press Release TK
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Cover design by Leah Angstman, with artwork by Nika Akin.

2023 Guest Editor

CATHERINE McNAMARA grew up in Sydney, ran away to Paris to write, and ended up in West Africa co-running a bar. Love Stories for Hectic People (flash fiction) won Best Short Story Collection in the Saboteur Awards 2021 (UK). The Cartography of Others (short stories) was a finalist in the People’s Book Prize (UK) and won the Eyelands Fiction Award (Greece). Pelt and Other Stories was a semifinalist in the Hudson Prize (USA) and longlisted for the Frank O’Connor Award (Ireland). The Carnal Fugues (selected stories) is out in November 2023 in Australia. Catherine hikes, grows cherries, and hosts writer retreats at her farmhouse in Italy.

2023 Series Editor

NATHAN LESLIE won the 2019 Washington Writers’ Publishing House prize for fiction for his collection of short stories, Hurry Up and Relax. Invisible Hand (2022) and A Fly in the Ointment (2023) are his latest books. Nathan’s previous works of fiction include Three Men, Root and Shoot, Sibs, and The Tall Tale of Tommy Twice. He is also the author of a collection of poems, Night Sweat. Nathan is currently the founder and organizer of the Reston Reading Series in Reston, Virginia, and the publisher and editor of the online journal Maryland Literary Review. Previously he was series editor for Best of the Web and fiction editor for Pedestal Magazine. His fiction has been published in hundreds of literary magazines, such as Shenandoah, North American Review, Boulevard, Hotel Amerika, and Cimarron Review. Nathan’s nonfiction has been published in The Washington Post, Kansas City Star, and Orlando Sentinel. He lives in Northern Virginia.

2023 Managing Editor

MICHELLE ELVY is a writer and editor in Ōtepoti Dunedin, on the South Island of Aotearoa New Zealand. Her books include the everrumble (2019) and the other side of better (2021), and she has recently coedited, among others, the anthologies A Kind of Shelter: Whakaruru-taha (2023), A Cluster of Lights: 52 Writers Then and Now (2023), Breach of All Size: Small Stories on Ulysses, Love, and Venice (2022), and Ko Aotearoa Tātou | We Are New Zealand (2020). Founder of National Flash Fiction Day New Zealand and Flash Frontier: An Adventure in Short Fiction, Michelle also teaches online at 52|250: A Year of Writing. Find out more at michelleelvy.com.

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• Reviewed at The Loch Raven Review

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