The Best Small Fictions 2016
Ed. Stuart Dybek. Series editor: Tara L. Masih. Queen’s
Ferry Press, $14.95 paperback (148p) ISBN 978-1-938466-74-8
Best Small Fictions 2016 collects 45 super-short stories that stand out for their structure,
voice, and character development—all in spite of often extreme brevity.
Together they cover a huge range of subject matter and occupy various points on
what editor Stuart Dybek, in his introduction, calls a “continuum of infinite
gradations that spans the poles of fiction and poetry.”
The opening story, Rosie Forrest’s “Bless This Home,”
is an example of just how much can be achieved within a few pages. The prose,
echoing Daniel Woodrell, evokes a hardscrabble country existence wreathed in
woodsmoke. The teen narrator’s no-nonsense speech quickly establishes her in relation
to her mother, her mother’s pretentious boyfriend, and the bearded tenant down
the hill. “When something is forbidden, the four winds conspire like a pack of
wolves,” she confides, setting up for the terrifically transgressive final
paragraphs.
Point-of-view is crucial in small fictions: it must be
established immediately, and it helps if it’s an unusual perspective—like that
of a Venus flytrap observing a household’s upheavals (Janey Skinner’s
“Carnivores”), or of potential names gathering around a baptismal font (Alberto
Chimal’s “The Waterfall”). Sometimes a concrete identity isn’t necessary,
though: when James Kennedy’s “World’s Worst Clown” fails to cheer a dying
five-year-old, readers learn no more
about the narrator than that s/he takes the clown home from the hospital and
sleeps with him. David Naimon’s one-paragraph run-on, “Past a Roar Completed,”
uses dialect and neologism to craft a strong voice even though all we know is
that these characters are in a boat, taking a different route to normal down the
river.
Humor and pathos provide sharp pivot points. Amelia
Gray’s “These Are the Fables,” for instance, catalogs an amusing litany of
strikes against the central couple, not least that the narrator announces her
pregnancy just as she and her partner are escaping a burning Dunkin’ Donuts.
Likewise, Paul Beckman’s “Healing Time” strikes a balance between somber and
witty in its depiction of dysfunctional family members who aren’t speaking to
each other;even meeting at the matriarch’s deathbed can’t trump old wrongs and
feuds.
Hard as it is to choose from such a diverse bunch, I
do have three favorites: Elizabeth Morton’s “Parting,” in which a divorce
causes everything to be literally divided—“It was half good … I was
half-impressed”; Mary-Jane Holmes’s “Trifle,” where alliteration and culinary
vocabulary contrast an English summer with Middle Eastern traces; and Amir
Adam’s “The Physics of Satellites,” which uses images from astronomy and a
recent family suicide to contrast falling, flying, and barely holding on.
This annual collection of the finest flash fiction is
in its second year. There are fewer highlights than in the previous volume, but
this remains an excellent snapshot of contemporary short-short stories—with the
welcome addition of a few in translation. “Learn to love specificity,” Megan
Giddings advises in an appended author interview, a tip that will benefit
readers as much as writers. You’ll love these specific scenes and voices in all
their variety. (September 2016)
Purchase The Best
Small Fictions 2016 HERE.
Reviewer bio: Rebecca Foster, an American transplant to England, is a freelance writer
and editor. Her book reviews appear in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Foreword
Reviews, among other print and online locales. She also blogs at
bookishbeck.wordpress.com.
