Best Small Fictions 2024
Flash, Haibun, Micro, & Hybrid
102 Pieces by 101 Authors Nominated by Indie Presses Around the World
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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 2024 introduction by guest editor Amber Sparks:
The very-short story writer must take those basic elements of story and crush them down into a very small, dazzling diamond. Small fictions can often be epic, spanning centuries, epochs, geological ages; and keeping them so tightly compressed can lend an air of almost mystic importance, of great and terrible power to describe and remake the world in an instant.
When I think about small in art, I think dollhouses, dioramas, miniature portraits. I think Joseph Cornell’s boxes and Walter Potter’s taxidermies. I think of Wes Anderson’s short films and Victorian mourning lockets. In other words, I imagine tight spaces that contain an ocean of story. To me, a small fiction is a planetarium: It contains the whole universe within, and we are all invited to look and look and look. I hope the universe opens to you in this book.
Content Warning: coming soon
2024 Selections
- “And the Crowd Goes” by Phoenix Alexander / Arcturus*
- “The Year of the Flood” by Sudha Balagopal / Journal of Compressed Creative Arts*
- “The Matchbook” by Aimee Bender / Matchbook Stories*
- “Red Pilgrims” by Renee Chen / Trampset*
- “The Moon Is a White Corn Tortilla, the Night a Sizzling Comal, and the Stars Are Parmesan Cheese Because God Loves Quesadillas with His Nightly Cafecito” by Moisés R. Delgado / Split Lip Magazine*
- “Love 1992: A Catechism” by Deesha Philyaw / Fractured Lit*
- “Lipshine #18 Champagne Gold” by Val Rigodon / Fairy Tale Review*
- “Were” by Kathleen Rooney / Heavy Feather Review*
- “Timetable for Learning to Eat Alone” by Lauren D. Woods / Moon City Review*
- “When You Visit Manhattan on Saturday and Your Boyfriend Who Lives in Queens Says He Can’t Come” by Nathan Xie / Craft*
- “The Good Prizes” by Daniel Addercouth / New Flash Fiction Review
- “Swings and Roundabouts” by Mikki Aronoff / Emerge Literary Journal
- “Tonight, I Might Commit the Most Grievous Crime” by Eniola Abdulroqeeb Arówólò / Anmly
- “Back When I Was Drinking” by Tom Bailey / Ploughshares
- “Tijuana” by Victoria Ballesteros / Your Impossible Voice
- “Cuttlefish” by Patricia Q. Bidar / Scratching the Sands: National Flash Fiction Day Anthology 2023
- “There Are a Million Ways to Say Goodbye, and How Can I Possibly Choose?” by Lindy Biller / The Welkin Writing Prize
- “Eight Ideas That Didn’t Make It into My Short-Story Collection” by T. J. Butler / Dating Silky Maxwell
- “Like Real Women Do” by Avitus B. Carle / Okay Donkey
- “The Pink Rats Inside Us” by Meg Cass / Anmly
- “In the Blink of an Eye” by Christine H. Chen / JMWW
- “Bushfire” by Sherryl Clark / Flash Frontier
- “Something” by Dan Crawley / Flash Frog
- “Tunneling” by Josh Denslow / Electric Literature
- “Quiet” by Cristi Donoso / The Citron Review
- “Year of the Farrier” by Lynn Edge / MacQueen’s Quinterly
- “The Whirlpool Duet” by Becky Ellis / Northwest Review
- “First Generation” by Olivia Fantini / Ecotone
- “Carve” by Allison Field Bell / The Bridport Prize Anthology 2023
- “Pears” by Jennifer Fliss / Ruby
- “Perpetual Motion” by Thaisa Frank / Gargoyle Magazine
- “Cancerous Sneak” by Helen Freeman / The Ekphrastic Review
- “Sellinger” by Scott F. Gandert / Apple Valley Review
- “Body” by Scott Garson / MoonPark Review
- “Nice Little Girls” by Jo Gatford / Cease, Cows
- “Boilermaker” by J. W. Goll / New Flash Fiction Review
- “Penny, Barbara, Ruth, Irene” by Amy Grote / Craft
- “The Last Goodbye in the City of Electric Longing” by L. M. Guay / Small Wonders
- “Ojuju-Kalaba” by Ola W. Halim / SmokeLong Quarterly
- “The Times I’ll Trade Time with the Crows” by Joel Hans / Atlas and Alice
- “The Abortion Clinic for People Caught in Folk Tales” by Pauline Holdsworth / Pithead Chapel
- “I’ve Never Heard of a Wind Stone” by Jonathan Humphrey / Contemporary Haibun Online
- “Already Among the Clouds” by Ibrahim Babátúndé Ibrahim / Necessary Fiction
- “As in the Days of Noah” by Bethany Jarmul / Cease, Cows
- “Unprecedented Weather Patterns” by Bethany Jarmul / Gone Lawn
- “Uncle Soul” by Andrea Jurjević / Centaur
- “Daily Pilgrimage” by Angie Kang / Sundog Lit
- “Motherland” by Volha Kastsiuk / At the Bay / I Te Kokoru
- “Spaceship in a Bottle” by Robert P. Kaye / Moon City Review
- “Rehydration” by Sean Wai Keung / Sine Theta Magazine
- “Before I Used Chairs” by Max Kruger-Dull / Quarterly West
- “A Door Is a Secret, Revealed” by Kathryn Kulpa / Fictive Dream
- “Bog Iron” by Shane Larkin / New Flash Fiction Review
- “Imagining the Woman Known Only as Wife on This Eroded Tombstone in the Old Butler Cemetery off Route 194” by Janice Leadingham / Reckon Review
- “The Wedding Photographer Photographer” by Matt Leibel / Aquifer: The Florida Review
- “Seventeen” by Joshua Jones Lofflin / The Baltimore Review
- “The Buddha Who Couldn’t Feel and the Fish on the Floor” by Emily Lu / Heavy Feather Review
- “Amen: The End of Men” by Owolusi Lucky / Reckon Review
- “The Oomancer” by Lorette C. Luzajic / Litro Magazine
- “At Weekends Mama’s Carnivore” by Rosaleen Lynch / Ruby
- “Buoyant” by Avra Margariti / Lost Balloon
- “House Story” by Michael Mark / Journal of Compressed Creative Arts
- “Whale Song” by Jeff Martin / The Masters Review
- “Eminent Domain” by Jolene McIlwain / Belt Magazine / Sidle Creek
- “Fulfilling” by Fiona McKay / New Flash Fiction Review
- “Sabine” by Catherine McNamara / Fictive Dream
- “And Eat It” by Faith Merino / Sundog Lit
- “Solar Flare” by Claudia Monpere / Atlas and Alice
- “Leap” by Sarah Fawn Montgomery / Necessary Fiction
- “Demolition” by Will Musgrove / Identity Theory
- “Into the White” by Gillian O’Shaughnessy / Fractured Lit
- “Midwest Oasis” by Briar Ripley Page / Traveler’s Tales / Ice Queen Magazine
- “Of Foliage” by Mandira Pattnaik / Birch Bark Editing
- “Hatching Moths” by Emily Pegg / The Masters Review
- “You-Are-Not-Mad Lib” by Jennifer Perrine / The Maine Review
- “The Bread of Life” by Katherine Plumhoff / Heavy Feather Review
- “Once upon a Time in West Auckland by Hayden Pyke / Flash Frontier
- “A Dog Story Doggedly Told” by Philip Raisor / Midway Journal
- “When You Receive the Notice to Policyholders Regarding the Liquidation of Your Insurance Company” by Colleen Rothman / Maudlin House
- “The Replacement” by Paul Rousseau / Craft
- “Northbound Highway 101” by Chi S. / Longleaf Review
- “Close Calls” by Robert Scotellaro / Quick Adjustments
- “The Selkie of the City Tells All” by J. D. Scott / Fairy Tale Review
- “A New Kind of Dan” by Kyle Seibel / Trampset
- “That Summer” by Helen Sheehy / Wrong Turn Lit
- “This Town” by Jeanine Skowronski / MoonPark Review
- “Feeding Time” by Jen Soong / Already Gone: 40 Stories of Running Away
- “All of Us, Shaking” by L. Soviero / Emerge Literary Journal
- “Googling Liver Failure While Adeline Pours Another Whiskey” by Jenny Stalter / Ghost Parachute
- “My Landlord and I” by Michael Hugh Stewart / The Cincinnati Review
- “Three Ways Out” by Adam Straus / Trampset
- “Lanternfly” by K. P. Taylor / Scrawl Place
- “The Girl with the Third Leg” by Christina Tudor / Gargoyle Magazine
- “I’m Learning How to Die Out” by Deb Olin Unferth / The Hopkins Review
- “Möbius Band” by Jie Wang / Bone Parade
- “Life Cycle” by Max Wheeler / Astrolabe
- “Gabapentin” by Tom Williams / Revolution John
- “Toy Collector” by Rebecca Winterer / Identity Theory
- “No Clubs” by Joel Worford / Hayden’s Ferry Review
- “Last Day Cupcakes” by Jeffrey Yamaguchi / Okay Donkey
- “There Are Hundreds of Beautiful Asian Women Waiting to Meet You” by Tessa Yang / Craft
- “Tea and Seeds” by Yasmine Yu / The Cincinnati Review
*Top 10 spotlighted story selections, chosen by guest editor Amber Sparks.
Also by Sudha Balagopal, Patricia Q. Bidar, Dan Crawley, Jonathan Humphrey, Lorette C. Luzajic, Catherine McNamara, & Gillian O’Shaughnessy
Also by Lindy Biller, Jennifer Fliss, & Mandira Pattnaik
Also by Kathleen Rooney
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• Anthology | Fiction | Flash | Hybrid
• 5.5” x 8.5” Perfectbound Trade Paperback
• Cream Paper, 278 Pages
• Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-946580-53-5
• Paperback ISBN-10: 1-946580-53-8
• Ebook ISBN-13: Coming Soon
• Ebook ISBN-10: Coming Soon
• First Edition: January 28, 2025
• Short URL: Coming Soon
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Cover design by Leah Angstman.
2024 Guest Editor
AMBER SPARKS is the author of an upcoming novel, Happy People Don’t Live Here, and four collections of short fiction, including And I Do Not Forgive You: Revenges and Other Stories and The Unfinished World. Her fiction and essays have appeared in American Short Fiction, The Paris Review, Slate, Tin House, Granta, The Cut, and elsewhere. Her last collection was longlisted for the Story Prize, and she received a residency fellowship at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, daughter, and two cats.
2024 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.
2024 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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