Robbins Library: Micro Fiction + Short Story Bingo Square

Press release from Robbins Library:

July 28, 2021

Micro fiction : an anthology of really short stories edited by Jerome Stern

Collection of short short stories, from contest winners and selected finalists for the annual World’s Best Short Short Story Contest, where each entry must be less than 250 words long.

Flash Fiction International: very short stories from around the world edited by James Thomas, Robert Shapard, Christopher Merrill

What is a flash fiction called in other countries? In Latin America it is a micro, in Denmark kortprosa, in Bulgaria mikro razkaz. These short shorts, usually no more than 750 words, range from linear narratives to the more unusual: stories based on mathematical forms, a paragraph-length novel, a scientific report on volcanic fireflies that proliferate in nightclubs. Flash has always―and everywhere―been a form of experiment, of possibility. A new entry in the lauded Flash and Sudden Fiction anthologies, this collection includes 86 of the most beautiful, provocative, and moving narratives by authors from six continents, including best-selling writer Etgar Keret, Zimbabwean writer Petina Gappah, Korean screenwriter Kim Young-ha, Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz, and Argentinian “Queen of the Microstory” Ana María Shua, among many others. These brilliantly chosen stories challenge readers to widen their vision and celebrate both the local and the universal. Publisher Description.

Bloodchild & Other Stories by Octavia Butler

“Bloodchild and Other Stories is renowned author Octavia E. Butler’s only collection of shorter work and features the Hugo and Nebula award-winning stories “Bloodchild” and “Speech Sounds.” These works of the imagination are parables of the contemporary world. Butler proves constant in her vigil, an unblinking pessimist hoping to be proven wrong, and one of contemporary literature’s strongest voices.”–Jacket.

Screen tests : stories and other writing by Kate Zambreno

In the first half of Kate Zambreno’s astoundingly original collection, the narrator regales us with incisive and witty swatches from a life lived inside a brilliant mind, meditating on aging and vanity, fame and failure, writing and writers, along with portraits of everyone from Susan Sontag to Amal Clooney, Maurice Blanchot to Louise Brooks. The series of essays that follow, on figures central to Zambreno’s thinking, including Kathy Acker, David Wojnarowicz, and Barbara Loden, are manifestoes about art, that ingeniously intersect and chime with the stories that came before them.

What it means when a man falls from the sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah

A dazzlingly accomplished debut collection explores the ties that bind parents and children, husbands and wives, lovers and friends to one another and to the places they call home. In “Who Will Greet You at Home,” a National Magazine Award finalist for The New Yorker, A woman desperate for a child weaves one out of hair, with unsettling results. In “Wild,” a disastrous night out shifts a teenager and her Nigerian cousin onto uneasy common ground. In “The Future Looks Good,” three generations of women are haunted by the ghosts of war, while in “Light,” a father struggles to protect and empower the daughter he loves. And in the title story, in a world ravaged by flood and riven by class, experts have discovered how to “fix the equation of a person” – with rippling, unforeseen repercussions. Evocative, playful, subversive, and incredibly human, What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky heralds the arrival of a prodigious talent with a remarkable career ahead of her”– Provided by publisher.

The man who shot out my eye is dead : stories by Chanelle Benz

“A stunningly original debut collection , the The man who shot out my eye is dead is about lives across history marked by violence and longing. In ten stories of impressive range, Chanelle Benz displays a staggering command of craft as she crisscrossses through time and space to create a complex mosaic of humanity.” This collection of stories explores diverse lives across history that are marked by violence and longing, from a Philadelphia youth who struggles with his father’s incarceration to a sixteenth-century English monk who suffers the dissolution of his monastery. “The characters in Benz’s wildly imaginative collection are as varied as in any recent literature, subverting boundaries of race, gender, and class, but they share a thirst for adventure that sends them rushing toward moral crossroads, becoming victims and perpetrators along the way. Riveting, viseral, and heartbreaking, Benz’s stories of identity, abandoment, and fierce love come together in a daring, arresting vision. Benz emerges on the scene as an indomitable talent and a brilliant new literary force.”

This press release was produced by Robbins Library. The views expressed here are the author’s own.