Best Small Fictions 2025
Flash, Haibun, Micro, & Hybrid
110 Pieces by 110 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 2025 introduction by guest editor Robert Shapard:
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Content Warning: coming soon
2025 Selections
- “Whale Fall” by Shauna Friesen / Gone Lawn *
- “Swamp” by Catherine Niu / The Cincinnati Review *
- “Teddy Bear Pancake” by Chris Scott / Weird Lit Magazine *
- “This Thing in Our Chests” by Awo Twumwaah / Afreada *
- “Finding the Water to Cry” by Jacqueline Goyette / Stanchion *
- “Messiah” by Kate O’Grady / Fish Anthology 2024 *
- “No Ponyboy” by Faithna Geffrard / Susurrus *
- “Sundays Are for Yard Work” by Kate Brody / Electric Literature *
- “Pupurangi Shelley” by Robert Sullivan / Hopurangi — Songcatcher: Poems from the Maramataka *
- “Heads” by Tina S. Zhu / Cease, Cows *
- “This Little Catalog You’ve Been Assembling” by Rosa Alcalá / The Hopkins Review
- “Thread” by Mikki Aronoff / The Mackinaw
- “Tokyo Panorama Suite” by Cassandra Atherton / The Mackinaw
- “Record of Lumber Used in the Great Temple’s Main Hall” by Stewart C. Baker / Sans Press
- “And We Know” by Rebecca Ball / Flash Frontier
- “All Made-Up” by Megan Baxter / Diagram
- “Evacuated” by Aimee Bender / Vestal Review
- “Wool” by Carly Berwick / The Cincinnati Review
- “Something That I Learned from Someone Who Is Gone” by Darsie Bowden / The Prose Poem
- “Doubting the Enterprise” by Brady Brickner-Wood / Sonora Review
- “Tell Me I’d Look Pretty on Your Wall” by Sébastien Luc Butler / Hayden’s Ferry Review
- “Things I Did to Live” by Joseph Byrd / Exposition Review
- “You Work in the Worst Diner in Existence That’s Always Open for Business” by Avitus B. Carle / X-Ray Literary Magazine
- “Razia, Razia” by Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar / The Good Life Review
- “Cumulonimbi” by Christine H. Chen / Flash Flood
- “NASA Plays I’ll Be Seeing You Trying to Wake the Mars Rover” by Chloe N. Clark / Banshee Press
- “Small Places” by Majella Cullinane / Meantime
- “Her Heart Was a Chipmunk” by Michael Czyzniejewski / Cleaver Magazine
- “This Because Dog Is God Spelled Backward” by Erinola E. Daranijo / Okay Donkey
- “Blue-Naped Parrots See More Than They Say” by Judy Darley / New Flash Fiction Review
- “Some Guilty Pleasures on This Side of the Border” by Moisés R. Delgado / Craft
- “Family Politics” by Ehiorobo Derek / African Poetry Book Fund Evaristo Prize 2024 Co-Winner
- “Things We Do for Loved Ones” by Thad DeVassie / Vast Literary Press
- “On Loneliness” by Merridawn Duckler / MacQueen’s Quinterly
- “What Would the Aliens Think?” by Ekpenyong Kosisochukwu Collins / SmokeLong Quarterly
- “Roofing in Warm Weather” by Corey Farrenkopf / Brilliant Flash Fiction
- “Based on a True Story” by Epiphany Ferrell / Witcraft
- “Nesting Doll” by Melissa Flores Anderson / Swamp Pink
- “At Once” by Sarah Freligh / Ghost Parachute
- “Lottery” by Scott Garson / Centaur
- “They Fired Up the Laser” by Timothy C. Goodwin / Dishsoap Quarterly
- “After Reading a Newspaper Clipping of Emily Dickinson’s Obituary Online” by Charlotte Hamrick / Gooseberry Pie Lit Magazine
- “Five Things She Brought with Her to the End of the World” by Fatema Haque / Hayden’s Ferry Review
- “The Beak” by Robbie Herbst / The Masters Review
- “Trespasser, Singular” by Alex Herod / Trash Cat Lit
- “Acorns / Hard / Underfoot on the Pavement” by D. G. Herring / Splonk
- “A Cock Among the Bathers” by Sara Hills / Bath Flash Fiction Award
- “One Summer” by Zac Hing / Takahē
- “Ledge (Ars Poetica) (Love Poem) (True Story)” by Amorak Huey / The Cincinnati Review
- “The Comeback” by Lincoln Jaques / Micro Madness
- “A Girl Experiments with Being Human” by Ruth Joffre / Barrelhouse
- “A Day in the Zoo” by Brianna Johnson / Emerge Literary Journal
- “Off a Duck’s Back” by Jupiter Jones / Tiny Sparks Everywhere
- “How to Bake a Cake in Outer Space” by Audra Kerr Brown / Moon City Review
- “Enough” by Mike Kilgannon / Bridport Prize
- “Family Night” by Ani King / SmokeLong Quarterly
- “The Long Walk North” by Caitlyn Kinsella / The Citron Review
- “I’ve Been Getting Letters from Santa for Twenty Years and All I’ve Learned Is He’s an Asshole” by Nicola Koh / Okay Donkey
- “Cowboy” by Francesca Leader / Southeast Review
- “Let’s Go Holoholo” by Melissa Llanes Brownlee / Wigleaf
- “Apparitions” by Arthur Mandal / Bending Genres
- “Aunt Lou” by Miriam McEwen / American Literary Review
- “The Way We Love Each Other” by Rebecca Meacham / The Ilanot Review
- “Pristine” by Douglas W. Milliken / Notch Magazine
- “This Is What Always Happens” by Khalid Mitchell / Astrolabe
- “Girl Locks” by Claudia Monpere / Split Lip Magazine
- “The Days the Cartoons Crept Out the TV” by James Montgomery / Micro Madness
- “Never Swim Alone” by Abigail Myers / JMWW
- “The Marionette” by Ivan Niccolai / Ink in Thirds
- “Little Flowers” by Gillian O’Shaughnessy / X-Ray Literary Magazine
- “The Lesson of Flash Floods” by Pamela Painter / Chestnut Review
- “Horsebroken” by Meg Pokrass / Fractured Lit
- “Small Towns” by Sam Rasnake / Bending Genres
- “Alternate Histories of El Salvador or Perhaps the World” by Ruben Reyes, Jr. / Bomb
- “Driving My Seven-Year-Old Nephew to Visit His Mother at Rehab” by Emily Rinkema / Bath Flash Fiction Award
- “Brittle Bones” by Belinda Rowe / Gone Lawn
- “Your Childhood Was Witchcraft” by Eden Royce / Cleaver
- “Crossing” by Thaddeus Rutkowski / Rathalla Review
- “An Inexhaustive List of Places Where You Grieved for Your Mother” by Debabrata Sahoo / Vestal Review
- “Daughter Fish” by Adrianna Sanchez-Lopez / The Citron Review
- “Concrete Worm” by Noémi Scheiring-Oláh / Hayden’s Ferry Review
- “A Trip to the Moon” by Nina Schuyler / Flash Fiction Magazine
- “Carnivorous Roads” by Robert Scotellaro / New World Writing Quarterly
- “Roller Coaster House” by Kyle Seibel / Had
- “A Hole in the Glass” by Abhishek Sengupta / The Forge Literary Magazine
- “How Do Crows Say I Love You?” by Beth Sherman / Tiny Molecules
- “It Never Mattered What Happened at Home” by Sumitra Singam / The Forge Literary Magazine
- “What We Do on a Night Like This” by Rachel Smith / Gooseberry Pie Lit Magazine
- “The Importance of Stems” by Cheryl Snell / The Dribble Drabble Review
- “Restless Coyote Pilfers the Night and She Does Not Need Your Judgment” by Sarah Sorensen / Jet Fuel Review
- “She Is There” by Eraldo Souza dos Santos / Inkfish Magazine
- “Pebbles” by Sarp Sozdinler / Atlas and Alice
- “The Aquarium” by Anna Stacy / Lunch Ticket
- “The Two Denvers” by Rebecca Starks / Craft
- “Clean Floors” by Dawn Tasaka Steffler / The Welkin Writing Prize
- “Psithurism” by Joshua Michael Stewart / Modern Haiku
- “Prudence” by Christy Stillwell / New Flash Fiction Review
- “Sister, Sister” by Ayotola Tehingbola / Split Lip Magazine
- “This That / That This” by Matthew Tomkinson / 3:AM Magazine
- “Jewel Bearing” by Adam Trodd / Banshee Press
- “Always Tomorrow” by Cathy Ulrich / MoonPark Review
- “Bus Stop” by Rekha Valliappan / A-Minor Magazine
- “Memory / I Send Myself” by Wangũi wa Kamonji / The Decolonial Passage
- “Smoke and Ash” by Jesse Wallis / Hayden’s Ferry Review
- “Memory in Three Acts” by Shannon K. Winston / Jet Fuel Review
- “Splinter” by Didi Wood / Fractured Lit
- “Cliché” by David Yourdon / Atlas and Alice
- “Let Go of the Bones” by Yasmine Yu / Lost Balloon
- “Nascent” by Tara Isabel Zambrano / Identity Theory
- “Layered House” by Lucy Zhang / -ette Review
*Top 10 spotlighted story selections, chosen by guest editor Robert Shapard.
Also by Mikki Aronoff, Aimee Bender, Avitus B. Carle, Christine H. Chen, Moisés R. Delgado, Scott Garson, Claudia Monpere, Gillian O’Shaughnessy, Robert Scotellaro, Kyle Seibel, & Yasmine Yu
Also by Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar, Charlotte Hamrick, Sara Hills, Melissa Llanes Brownlee, Pamela Painter, Meg Pokrass, Sarp Sozdinler, Tara Isabel Zambrano, & Lucy Zhang
Also by Meg Pokrass & Didi Wood
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• Anthology | Fiction | Flash | Hybrid
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• First Edition: November, 2025
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Cover design by Leah Angstman.
2025 Guest Editor
ROBERT SHAPARD co-created and edited with James Thomas many volumes of W. W. Norton’s flash and sudden fiction anthologies. His own stories have appeared in journals such as New World Writing Quarterly, Kenyon Review, Juked, 100-Word Story, New Flash Fiction Review, Necessary Fiction, Typishly, Bending Genres, Fractured Lit, and New England Review and are collected in a new book, Bare Ana and Other Stories. He lives in Austin, Texas, where he helped establish America’s first flash fiction archive at the Harry Ransom Center. Join him on Facebook or at robertshapard.com.
2025 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.
2025 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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