Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, 8.1 (April 2015)

Abstract

The fourteenth issue of Flash, which features new stories from Botswana, Britain, Egypt, France, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Ireland, Japan, South Africa, Sweden, and the USA. We are pleased to open with four pieces by David Swann, whose Stronger Faster Shorter: Flash Fictions launched our new venture, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Press. For more information about the collection and the Press, please visit Flash’s website. This issue also includes the 2015 winner of the UK’s National Flash Fiction Youth Competition, ‘Hide and Seek’ by Helen Gurr, a talented A-level student at Wirral Grammar School for Girls. The competition was organized by Flash and the Department of English, University of Chester; it was judged by the editors and leading flash author Vanessa Gebbie. ‘Flash Presents’ contains four pieces – ‘The Interview’, ‘The Goat Tetherer Attempts to Make History’, ‘The Shortage at the Petting Zoo’, and ‘Storage’ – from Nick Parker’s acclaimed debut collection The Exploding Boy and Other Tiny Tales (2011). In the ‘Flash Essay’ section, Charlotte Rich connects ‘Kate Chopin’s Very Short Stories’ to the late-nineteenth-century American author’s longer work. Alongside the essay, ‘A Very Fine Fiddle’ is reprinted; in Flash, 7.1, you can read ‘A Harbinger’, ‘Doctor Chevalier’s Lie’, ‘Old Aunt Peggy’, and ‘Ripe Figs’. ‘Flash Reviews’ assesses a rich diversity of texts: three chapbooks (Nuala Ní Chonchúir’s Of Dublin and Other Fictions, William Todd Seabrook’s The Imagination of Lewis Carroll, and Shellie Zacharia’s Not Everything Lovely and Strange Is a Dream); three longer collections (Stuart Dybek’s Ecstatic Cahoots, James Robertson’s 365, and Avital Gad-Cykman’s Life In, Life Out); and a compendium of five novellas-in-flash with accompanying craft essays (My Very End of the Universe, by Tiff Holland, Meg Pokrass, Aaron Teel, Margaret Patton Chapman, and Chris Bower). Copies of the magazine are available through the magazine’s website: http://www.chester.ac.uk/flash.magazine