New Sudden Fiction: Short-Short Stories from America and Beyond by Robert Shapard (Editor), James Thomas (Editor)

From the Publisher

Responding to America's love affair with the short-short, editors Robert Shapard and James Thomas searched thousands of books and magazines to select these sixty stories-each under 2,000 words, each with its own element of surprise, whether traditional, experimental, humorous, moving, or magical. In the process they discovered both new talents and a wealth of celebrated writers, such as Jorge Luis Arzola, Aimee Bender, Teolinda Gers"o, Romulus Linney, Yann Martel, Sam Shepard, and Tobias Wolff.



Zdravka Evitmova conjures blood drops that cure any disease. Ian Frazier writes public relations for crows. Juan Jos&eaccute; Mil&aaccute;s leads an amnesiac husband to an affair in the candlelit darkness of a cathedral with his wife.



Students and lovers of literature take note: this is serious writing that's fun to read.

KLIATT

These fast-paced, very short stories each run three pages or less. A few of the stories are translated from Spanish and Portuguese. In "Footnote," a French love story, Madame du Chatelet is apparently enjoying her friendship with Voltaire and Lieutenant Saint-Lambert while her husband is away on military duty. Readers will want to know what happens and why he is called home by his wife, who is now expecting a baby. "The Palmist" from South China tells of a man losing his son, mother and two sisters on their escape to America. On his bus ride home he tries to read an American teenager's palm; the teen finally gives in when pressured by the other riders. Readers will be amazed by the results of his reading. Each story brings with it a rich foreign culture; they are unusual. A few selections succeed in stirring up tension and suspense. A good choice for high school and public libraries.

Kirkus Reviews

Lively collection of 60 bite-sized fiction pieces. In their exuberant introduction, the editors introduce readers to the genre of sudden fiction. As distinct from the super-short burst of narrative known as flash fiction as it is from the sort of ruminative short story one might find in a prestigious magazine, sudden fiction averages "a whopping 1,500 words," combining the intense emotional charge of the former with the narrative arc of the latter. The anthology gathers stories from magazines and websites and includes work by well-known writers like Joyce Carol Oates, Elizabeth Berg and David Foster Wallace, as well as up-and-coming writers; it is primarily composed of American writers, but it is peppered with contributors from other countries. Best of all, there's not a dud in the bunch. Because they are so compressed, none of the stories is particularly plot driven, but in different ways, each is a fine example of the craft of story writing. Most of them are in the first-person, showcasing a rich narrator with an idiosyncratic voice. Among the standouts are Jenny Hollowell's beautiful "A History of Everything, Including You," which unfolds the secret emotional life of an entire marriage in a matter of paragraphs, and Tessa Brown's "In Reference to Your Recent Communications," a masterly adaptation of the memo form to describe a failed relationship. The more conventionally structured stories effectively isolate a moment in time. Yann Martel's grimly funny "We Ate the Children Last" is exemplary, as is Katherin Nolte's painfully sharp "Before the Train and After."Successful and satisfying.

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