Sudden Fiction

[Manchegan]

I was assigned this collection of short stories called Sudden Fiction for a class and was dissappointed to find that each story was only 2-3 pages. I thought any serious literary works would require around ten pages to really get into a character and plot. I was wrong. Many of the stories are phenomenal and have the same kicked in the gut feeling you get with a novel.

The intro to the collection talks about how the editors struggled to name this emerging phenomenon in prose. They argue that these aren't traditional short stories but an entirely different form that serves its own unique purpose.

Has anyone read some extremely short but powerful fiction? What do you think about the possibilities of so few words to tell a complete story?

[Jason Lycurgus]

I always liked this Kafka short story. I think it might fit the description of what you are talking about.

http://www.kafka.org/index.php?id=198,284,0,0,1,0

[Three Sparrows]

Fascinating. I would love to read more stories like that; I wonder if I will ever see them in a book store? It would be interesting to see the reaction to them.
I mean the stories, not the Odradeck thingy. Don't you just love Kafka?

[Manchegan]

It's a shame I've already joined this site and picked a name. Odradek would have been a thousand times better. Perhaps on another board in another time...

here's a link to my favorite so far from the Sudden Fiction:

Twirler (http://books.google.com/books?id=eEY0wIVuYdIC&pg=PA37&lpg=PA37&dq=twirler+by+jane+martin&source=bl&ots=j0U5yYNHOH&sig=gi76PD-Ww5x4B5UQxh8pwV8Txfw&hl=en&ei=SSajSrOrB4_EsQPV0pyNDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8#v=onepage&q=twirler%20by%20jane%20martin&f=false)

Apperently it's usually performed as a monologue, but I think I prefer it as prose. There's no chance of it being ruined by poor acting, and You can follow the images described better, since you're not actually looking at a person talking.

[sixsmith]

Yeah i love this stuff. Flash Fiction (as i've seen it called) is often less than a page long. Several great stories from Chekhov, Carver et al are very, very short.

[billl]

EDIT

the selection was on that google books thing, but part of it was missing so people would buy the book.

[Pecksie]

I once read an anthology of the winning entries in a literary contest where submissions had to be fifteen lines or less.

You'd be amazed at how incredible some of these micro-stories were.

[Jozanny]

I know I am bucking the trend, but I tend not to like micro or sudden fiction. I do not really believe 500 words or less tells a story, and it is here that the internet hurts the art itself, with ezines which at best offer *impressions* in prose. To me, a short story needs an arc, in the tradition of Granta, or The Atlantic Monthly. Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" fleshes out a complete and tragic character. Today readers want snapshots, which leaves me imperiled as a writer, since I like space for a story between 4,000 and 10,000 words.

[Madame X]

I’m generally not too prejudicial about length, or, if anything, I tend to be more wary of fictional works that presume encyclopaedic proportions than the other way around (my interest inevitably has its limits). A work that abstracts from a more “fleshed-out” formulaic approach often, though certainly not always, benefits from the fact that its very brevity (of whatever isolated thought/scene/moment; the objective not necessarily being to tell a story) demands it to be something of aesthetic impact. Trakl’s poetic prose fragments, for example, are hardly episodic but verifiably hum with atmosphere, which, by the by, I’ve discovered have the estimable side-effect of causing these brief little moments of near psychotic-like disorientation when reading too many in succession. Kafka’s Meditations are equally as dementia-inducing. :)

[NickAdams]

Hemingway's in our time was a collection of flash-fiction and was later incorporated into the In Our Time that most readers are familiar with.

[mono]

Yeah i love this stuff. Flash Fiction (as i've seen it called) is often less than a page long. Several great stories from Chekhov, Carver et al are very, very short.
I have heard it mostly called this, too, and most flash fiction seems hit-or-miss for me. Anton Chekhov and Raymond Carver wrote some stellar flash fiction, but the faster fiction by O. Henry, Ernest Hemingway, and Franz Kafka amaze me! I even recall Hemingway's 6-word short story, a bit of a pun on flash fiction, but definitely of his nature:

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

[sixsmith]

I have heard it mostly called this, too, and most flash fiction seems hit-or-miss for me. Anton Chekhov and Raymond Carver wrote some stellar flash fiction, but the faster fiction by O. Henry, Ernest Hemingway, and Franz Kafka amaze me! I even recall Hemingway's 6-word short story, a bit of a pun on flash fiction, but definitely of his nature:

It's very prominent in the legion of e-zines?? on the web. Seems to be a way of getting people into writing which i suppose is a good thing.

[Drkshadow03]

It's called flash fiction (usually defined as stories under 1,000 words).

Here is an example of flash fiction about Humpty Dumpty (http://www.angelfire.com/biz5/authors/mag/rant.html).

Flashquake (http://www.flashquake.org/fiction/index.html) is a professional e-zine dedicated to publishing flash fiction.

Vestal Review (http://www.vestalreview.net/mainpage36n.html) is another e-zine dedicated to publishing flash fiction.

[King Mob]

Some years ago, i don't know which magazine or newspaper invited several famous writers to write 6 word stories. I only remember Alan Moore's:

machine. Suddenly I've invented a time