Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories by Robert Shapard, James Thomas

From the Publisher

"We who love prose fiction love these miniature tales both to read and to write because they are so finite; so highly compressed and highly charged." Joyce Carol Oates

"People who like to skip can't skip in a three-page story." Grace Paley

"The short-short story is an exercise in virtuosity that tightens the circle of mystery surrounding what we know."
John L'Heureux

"It can do in a page what a novel does in two hundred. It covers years in less time, time in almost no time. It wants to deliver us to where we were before we began. Its aim is restorative, to keep us young." Mark Strand

"There are, in truth, more kinds of short-short stories than I ever knew of or imagined. Wonderful! I rejoice in the richness and variety of all these voices." George Garrett

"This collection represents the richness and variety of American writers. The 70 pieces themselves—highly compressed, often tantalizing—display a multiplicity of modes and derive them a variety of traditions." Publishers Weekly

Publishers Weekly

The short fiction (each piece is one to five pages long) in this collection represents the richness and variety of American writers. A few are no longer contemporary (Hemingway, Malamud, Cheever), many are well established (Paley, Oates, Updike, Donald Barthelme, Ray Bradbury, Peter Taylor, Raymond Carver) and many are newer presences on the fiction scene. With a tiny ``frontisstory'' by Robert Coover, a lighthearted introduction by Shapard and afterwords about the short-short-story form by 40 outstanding American writers, the definition of what lies between as ``sudden fiction'' is well attended to. The 70 pieces themselveshighly compressed, often tantalizingdisplay a multiplicity of modes and derive from a variety of traditions. The collection presents a group of writers whose miniature stories do, indeed, as the editors suggest, ``confer form on small corners of chaos.'' (October 15)

Library Journal

This anthology contains 70 stories, all under five pages. There are a few standards by Hemingway and Cheever, but most are contemporary pieces by such writers as Paley, Oates, and Carver and some unknowns. At its bestas exemplified by the offerings of John Upike, Arturo Vivante, Bel Kaufman, and Charles Johnsonthis ``sudden fiction'' form is devastating, at its worst, mere anecdote, but overall this is an unusual and well-conceived collection. In an afterword, 40 writers/editors discuss the genre's limitationsdoes it exist? what to call it?succinctly enough that the book may serve as a text for creative writing students as well as an interesting departure for the general reader. Recommended.Peter Bricklebank, English Dept., City Coll., CUNY

Product Details

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Table of Contents

Read an Excerpt

Introduction


All the works in this collection are from one to five pages long, and all are by American authors. A few are familiar, but the great majority have been published within the last five years.


Because they are so new, and sometimes so unlike the modern notion of story, it was by no means clear at the outset exactly what to call these works. Short-short stories? Fictions? Or something else entirely? Almost nothing has been said about them yet by literary critics, so we asked the editors who publish them, and especially the writers who write them, What are these things? And, Why are we seeing so many of them now? With our queries, we sent an early version of this book under the working title, Blasters.