Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories

by Shapard, Robert

• ISBN13: 9780879052652
• ISBN10: 0879052651
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1987-02-01
• Publisher: Ingram Pub Services

Summary

Here Are 70 of The Very Best Short-Short Stories of Recent Years Including Contributions From Such Contemporary Writers As Raymond Carver, Leonard Michaels and John Updike; A Few Modern Masters As Hemingway and Cheever; and An Assortment of Talented New Young Writers. Sudden Fiction Brilliantly Captures The Tremendous Popularity of This New and Distictly American Form.

Table of Contents

A Sudden Story

Introduction

The Stories

Afterwords

Toward a New Form

A Practicum

Skippers, Snappers, and Blasters

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

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.