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Every morning I wake with my wife on the right, and I expect her to be yelling, to be angry, demanding to know why I’ve been unfaithful, but every morning she is only ashes in an urn.’ Meyer demonstrates in ‘Nightstands’ exactly how flash can tightly pack so much meaning in the smallest of crevices. Each sentence in Meyer’s story drives this tiny story onwards, each revealing a key detail and building on what came before: ‘Every morning I wake with a new woman on my left. Allen describes one of the stories from SLQ in this anthology, Cole Meyer’s ‘Nightstands’, as starting ‘with a great idea, a play on words’ before Meyer ‘unravels his character’s dilemma with precision and brevity’.
#BEST READS 2017 FICTION SERIES#
As noted in the interview with Managing Editor, Christopher Allen, SLQ is always well represented in this anthology series and others, such as the annual Wigleaf Top 50. The honour belongs to SmokeLong Quarterly this time, an online journal that anyone who reads flash should be well acquainted with. The story is laced with wit, the language is stripped back to the bare essentials, and culminates in a final striking image that offers a spectacular opening to the anthology.Īs well as a spotlight author, there is a spotlight press or publication.
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‘36’ tells the story of Penny and the house she and her husband lived in, a house that she despises and rents out after her husband’s death. The two stories, taken from 99 Stories of God (Tin House Books, 2016) serve as a great opening to the anthology and as a taster of Williams’ engaging, stripped-back collection itself. This year’s spotlight author is Joy Williams, a renowned American writer. From Matthew Baker’s island of presidential doppelgangers to Harriot West’s ekphrastic haibun story about Van Gogh’s sunflowers, each of the pieces in this anthology proves that writers are not only continuing to produce high-quality flash fiction, but that the imagination and scope of flash fiction is far-reaching, whether writers choose to explore the uncharted or re-invent the wheel.Ī wonderful aspect of this series is its author spotlight, which includes an interview with an author with either more than one story in the anthology or multiple nominations (and being nominated just the once is an achievement in itself!). The third instalment of one of the most popular and esteemed series of flash fiction anthologies, The Best Small Fictions 2017 (Braddock Avenue Books, 2017), is an essential read for every flash fiction writer or reader.