Flash fiction is a style of fictional literature or fiction of extreme brevity. There is no widely accepted definition of the length of the category. Some self-described markets for flash fiction impose caps as low as three hundred words, while others consider stories as long as a thousand words to be flash fiction.
Terms
One of the first known usages of the term "flash fiction" in reference to the literary style was the 1992 anthology Flash Fiction: Seventy-Two Very Short Stories. Editor James Thomas stated that the editors' definition of a "flash fiction" was a story that would fit on two facing pages of a typical digest-sized literary magazine. In China the style is frequently called a "smoke long" or "palm-sized" story, with the comparison being that the story should be finished before the reader could finish smoking a cigarette.
Other names for flash fiction include micro fiction, micro narrative, micro-story, postcard fiction, short short, short short story, and sudden fiction, though distinctions are sometimes drawn among some of these terms; for example, sometimes 1000 words is considered the cutoff between "flash fiction" and the slightly longer short story "sudden fiction". The terms "micro fiction" and "micro narrative" are sometimes defined as below 300 words. The term "short short story" was the most common term until about 2000, when it was overtaken by "flash fiction".
Authors
Very short fiction has roots going back to Aesop's Fables and Zen koans. Practitioners have included Saadi of Shiraz ("Gulistan of Sa'di"), Bolesław Prus, Anton Chekhov, O. Henry, Franz Kafka, Lydia Davis, H.P. Lovecraft, Yasunari Kawabata, Ernest Hemingway, Julio Cortázar, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Fredric Brown, and John Cage. Examples of Hemingway's pioneering of the form are the 18 very short pieces in his first short-story collection, In Our Time. It is disputed whether (to win a bet), as alleged, he also wrote the flash fiction "For Sale, Baby Shoes, Never Worn".
British writers well-known for their flash fiction include David Gaffney and Tania Hershman.
Spanish-speaking literature has many authors of microstories, including Augusto Monterroso ("El dinosaurio"), Luis Felipe Lomelà ("El Emigrante"), and Juan Pedro Aparicio ("Luis XIV"). Their microstories are some of the shortest ever written in that language. In Spain, authors of microrrelatos (very short fictions) have included Ignacio MartÃnez de Pisón, Andrés Neuman, Ramón Gómez de la Serna, José Jiménez Lozano, Javier Tomeo, José MarÃa Merino, Juan José Millás, and Ã"scar Esquivias. In Argentina, notable contemporary contributors to the genre have included Marco Denevi, Luisa Valenzuela, Raúl Brasca, and Ana MarÃa Shua.
The Italian writer Italo Calvino consciously searched for a short narrative form, drawing inspiration from Argentine writers Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares and finding that Monterroso's was "the most perfect he could find"; "El dinosaurio", in turn, possibly inspired his "The Dinosaurs".
In France and Francophone countries, micronouvelles have been popularized by authors such as Jacques Fuentealba, Vincent Bastin, Olivier Gechter, Stephane Bataillon and Laurent Berthiaume.
German-language authors of Kürzestgeschichten, influenced by brief narratives penned by Bertolt Brecht and Franz Kafka, have included Peter Bichsel, Heimito von Doderer, Günter Kunert, and Helmut Heißenbüttel.
The Arabic-speaking world has produced a number of micro-story authors, including the Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz, whose book Echoes of an Autobiography is composed mainly of such stories. Other flash fiction writers in Arabic include Zakariya Tamir, Sulayman al-Tuwayhir, Haydar Haydar, Husam Fakhr, Mahmud Shuqayr, Layla al-'Uthman and Dimah Sahwayl.
In the Russian-speaking world the best known flash fiction author is Linor Goralik.
Internet
Access to the Internet has enhanced an awareness of flash fiction, with websites and zines such as Flash Fiction Online being devoted entirely to the style. Author Paulo Coelho remarked that the "democratization of communication offered by the Internet has made positive in-roads" and directly influenced the style's popularity. Notable flash fiction writers online include Bruce Holland Rogers, Steve Almond, Barbara Henning, and Nancy Stohlman.
Vignette
Unlike a vignette, flash fiction often contains the classic story elements: protagonist, conflict, obstacles or complications, and resolution. However, unlike a traditional short story, the limited word length often forces some of these elements to remain unwritten â€" that is, hinted at or implied in the written storyline. Different readers thus may have different interpretations.
See also
- Prose poetry
- Short story
- Fable
- Parable
- Drabble
Notes
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Bibliography
- Christopher Kasparek, "Two Micro-Stories by BolesÅ‚aw Prus," The Polish Review, 1995, no. 1, pp. 99â€"103.
- Zygmunt Szweykowski, Twórczość Bolesława Prusa (The Art of Bolesław Prus), 2nd ed., Warsaw, Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1972.
External links
- The dictionary definition of flash fiction at Wiktionary
