The Best Small Fictions 2023, Flash Fiction, Alternating Currents Press, 2023, $19.99, 272 pages, ISBN: 978-1946580467
Now published by Alternating Currents Press but still under the guidance of Series Editor Nathan Leslie, The Best Small Fictions anthology continues to deliver dazzling selections of flash fiction published over the previous year, stories ranging to around a thousand words that consistently surprise us with their innovative structures and narrative styles. Some are comic, others heartbreaking. All are succinct.
The 109 fictions in the current edition are organized alphabetically by author in two sections, “Highlighted Stories” – 10 selected by guest editor Catherine McNamara – and the other 99 in a subsequent section. Several of the authors are familiar names in the genre – Kathy Fish, Pamela Painter and Meg Pokrass among them. The fictions come from a wide variety of both print and online journals, Salt Hill Journal, Scrawl Place, Atticus Review, Chestnut Review, So to Speak Journal, Pithead Chapel, MacQueen’s Quarterly, The Anchored World, Splonk, Ghost Parachute and JMWW among them.
Guest editor Catherine McNamara is impressive in her own right. In her bio we learn that she ran away from home in Sydney to become a writer in Paris and wound up running a bar in West Africa. In addition to being the author of several prize-winning collections, she runs writer retreats at her farmhouse in Italy! The stories she shines the spotlight on all reflect a nimble and judicious mind. (One of which, Lilian Liang’s “Three Incarnation Rituals” – Asian American Writers’ Workshop – emblematically concludes: “And the flowers! How they bloomed and bloomed and bloomed—”)
Sometimes the story titles alone are worth the price of admission. “Amelia Earhart Knew Seven Latin Words for Fire” by Joe Kapitan (New Flash Fiction Review), Sandra Schmuhl Long’s “Murder Mermaids Make Mistakes” (Electric Literature), Charlotte Hamrick’s “Tell Me Why It Was Bad to Execute Myself” (New World Writing Quarterly), Phoenix Tesni’s “An Unrequited Love Letter to the City That Murdered Me” (Renaissance Review), and M.L. Kristinan’s “Feeding on the Thamirabarani Metro” (Fractured Lit): the stories beg to be read. And the good news? They deliver on the promise!
The very first Spotlighted story, “A Man on the Street Offers Me a Cooked Shrimp,” by Andrea Frazier, originally in Lost Balloon, snags you right away, a first-person narrative that goes headlong for a full paragraph, one and a half pages, jumping right in with the sentence, “And I take it, lift the slick comma of flesh right off the paper plate he juts gently but determinedly into my path.” Right away we sense the danger, and the narrator mentions the “canister of pepper spray nestled like an heirloom bullet in the soft fleece of my coat pocket” more than once while she notes the “graveyard smile” of the strange man who offers the shrimp. But while we get a vivid picture of the protagonist, nothing bad happens! She heads home, flicking “the hollow tail onto some unknown neighbor’s front lawn.”
In this way the best of these short fictions snare us into their worlds and hold our attention to the end. Vincent Chavez’s “Heirloom,” which originally appeared in Wigleaf, is another 2-page single-paragraph sprint that pulls you in with “In another dimension, I got superpowers,” a long speech by the narrator to his uncle. Kasey Payette’s “We’re Not Weird about It,” first published in Waterstone Review, is another of these two-page fictions told in one breathless paragraph, a meandering tale of a New Age church with “video games and cool music and guys with piercings and a youth pastor who skateboards.” The narrator tells the person she’s talking to, presumably a teen contemporary, “You should totally come sometime,” and goes on about the prayers and the bible passages, the college girls who help with the youth group, the Holy Spirit, and the story ends pretty much where it began – “We go to church, but we’re not weird about it. You should totally come sometime.” The kid’s voice sounds so familiar; it feels like we’ve been there!
The anthology includes several haibun, a Japanese form that combines prose and haiku with an effect similar to flash fiction, short and punchy narratives. Jonathan Humphreys’ “The Boy from Cave City, Kentucky (A Wreath of Sourgrass),” originally in Contemporary Haibun Online, Saba Keramati’s “Haibun for Learning 中文 on Duolingo,” originally in Quarterly West, and “Something Tribal This Way Comes” by Moata McNamara, appearing first in the New Zealand-based At the Bay | I Te Kokoru, expand our understanding of what small fictions can do. Keramati’s haibun, a tale of generations and loss, begins “My mother tells me that when she loses her memory she will stop speaking English.” His mother’s mother, we learn has lost her hearing – and her hearing aids. The narrative concludes:
Owl flight is silent;
the feathers break turbulence
into quietude.
Silence. Indeed, as the epigraph to the 2023 edition of Best Small Fictions suggests, a quotation from Nobel laureate Toni Morrison in a 1993 interview in The Paris Review, “So, it is what you don’t write that frequently gives what you do write its power.” These concise fictions all rely on the unsaid to impress us with what they say, short narratives that reflect a larger, unspoken world. Now entering its tenth year of existence, the Best Small Fictions series shines a light on the expressive possibilities of short hybrid fiction, all around the world.
© Catherine McNamara, Nathan Leslie, Michelle Elvy, and Charles Rammelkamp
Catherine McNamara grew up in Sydney, ran away to Paris to write, and ended up in West Africa co-running a bar. Love Stories for Hectic People (flash fiction) won Best Short Story Collection in the Saboteur Awards 2021 (UK). The Cartography of Others (short stories) was a finalist in the People’s Book Prize (UK) and won the Eyelands Fiction Award (Greece). Pelt and Other Stories was a semifinalist in the Hudson Prize (USA) and longlisted for the Frank O’Connor Award (Ireland). The Carnal Fugues (selected stories) is out in November 2023 in Australia. Catherine hikes, grows cherries, and hosts writer retreats at her farmhouse in Italy.
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.
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.
Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. His poetry collection, A Magician Among the Spirits, poems about Harry Houdini, is a 2022 Blue Light Press Poetry winner. Another poetry collection, Transcendence, has also recently been published by BlazeVOX Books, and a collection of flash fiction, Presto, by Bamboo Dart Press. A collection of poems and flash called See What I Mean? will be published later this year by Kelsay Books.
The Loch Raven Review 