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Best Small Fictions

Best Small Fictions

Best Small Fictions

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Best Small Fictions Editors
& Advisory Board 2025

Guest Editor:
Robert Shapard

Series Editor:
Nathan Leslie

Managing Editor:
Michelle Elvy

Assistant Editors:
Barbara Byar
Damian Dressick 
Kate Horsley
Lynn Mundell 
Mandira Pattnaik 
Charles Rammelkamp

Consulting Editor:
Richard Peabody

Senior General Advisory Board:
Michael Cocchiarale
Kathy Fish
X. J. Kennedy
Clare MacQueen
Pamela Painter
Robert Shapard
James Thomas

Interns:
Cindy Nguyen

Founding Editor:
Tara Lynn Masih

Former Series Editors:
Sherrie Flick
Tara Lynn Masih

Contact

For inquiries about the Best Small Fictions series, please email Series Editor Nathan Leslie at fictionsnlbestsmall2019 [at] gmail [dot] com.

For distribution and sales questions, please email Alternating Current Executive Editor Leah Angstman at altcurrentpress [at] gmail [dot] com.

About Best Small Fictions

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. Now in its eleventh year of existence, Best Small Fictions features the best microfiction, flash fiction, haibun stories, and prose poetry from around the world.

Originally founded by Tara L. Masih, Best Small Fictions is currently steered by series editor Nathan Leslie, who has served in this role since 2019. Guest editors have included Pulitzer Prize-winner Robert Olen Butler (2015), PEN/Malamud Award-winner Stuart Dybek (2016), PEN/Malamud Award-winner Amy Hempel (2017), two-time Pushcart Prize-winner Aimee Bender (2018), PEN/Faulkner-nominee Rilla Askew (2019), Sonder Press operator Elena Stiehler (2020), PEN/Bingham Prize-winner Rion Amilcar Scott (2021), Bridport Prize-winner Elaine Chiew (2022), People’s Book Prize-winner Catherine McNamara (2023), Story Prize longlister Amber Sparks (2024), and award-winning cocreator and editor of the Norton Sudden and Flash Fiction anthologies Robert Shapard (2025).

Buy Current Edition (2025)

Submission Guidelines

Editors are encouraged to send their five best works of flash and microfiction, haibun stories, and prose poems published in the previous year. Submissions for the 2026 edition are now open and will consider pieces published in the 2025 calendar year. Submit via the portal link below. Submissions will close on January 31, 2026.

We encourage an eclectic array of styles and approaches. We love work featuring memorable imagery, characterization, and language. Submissions should be within 1,000 words; this is an approximate guideline, however, and we ask editors to use their own discretion. Submissions may be submitted as word documents, PDFs, or links to the published work.

Selected pieces will appear in the 2026 edition, and honorable-mention pieces and features may additionally appear in the online literary journal The Coil. All selected contributors will receive a complimentary PDF and ePUB of the finished anthology, along with a 40% discount for optional print versions.

Distribution

The 2023, 2024, 2025, and 2026 editions are or will be available in paperback distributed through Ingram and Asterism Books, and in ebook distributed through Ingram and OverDrive. Ingram’s print bookseller terms are 55% with free returns accepted. The editions are available to the public anywhere that books are sold and at all major online retailers. Please email altcurrentpress [at] gmail [dot] com for more information.

Past Issues in the Series

The 2015 and 2016 editions were originally published by Queen’s Ferry Press and have been reissued by Braddock Avenue Books, who also published the 2017 and 2018 editions. Sonder Press then took over publication and published the 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022 editions. Alternating Current Press currently publishes the series and has published the 2023, 2024, and 2025 editions, and will publish the 2026 edition.

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.

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. Nathan lives in Northern Virginia. 

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 co-edited, 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 NZ 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.

2025 Best Small Fictions Selections

* Top-10 Spotlighted Stories selected by guest editor Robert Shapard

Praise for the Series

“If you are a writer of any kind, this book is also a must-read because it will only enhance and inspire your own work, particularly through models of stellar openings/endings and meticulous editing.” —JMWW

“Give us succor, these essential stories implore the earth. Give us meaning, they ask the world. We need you and haven’t forgotten you, they say. Forgive us.” —SmokeLong Quarterly

“The best of these fictional vignettes are like a splash of ice water in the face. Wake up, they shout, your life is unspooling. They create their emotional effects with a quick windup and a powerful release, often a final, lingering image.” —Harvard Review

“[T]he beauty of an anthology such as this, pulling together the best of the form, is that you will always encounter something new, something different, something that pushes the boundaries of flash further than before. If this anthology proves nothing else, it is that small fiction in all its forms continues to go from strength to strength, as does the series itself.” —Bath Flash Fiction Award

“The fifty-five authors represented [in BSF 2015] have all triumphed. They’ve sliced open secret passageways within language and kicked readers toward infinity. Yes, we’ve heard it before about the short form, and yes, it’s true, “Less is more,” though here it could be “Less is” or “More is.” What we’re finding, or re-finding, is simply “It is,” and it’s wonderful.” —The Small Press Book Review

“It will be well worth your while to spend a minute or 60 with some of the brightest concise writing available today.” —NewPages

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