Author Description

BEST SMALL FICTIONS is the first-ever contemporary anthology solely dedicated to anthologizing the best internationally published short hybrid fiction in a given calendar year. Inaugurated with the 2015 edition, the series features the best microfiction, flash fiction, haibun stories, and prose poetry from around the world.<br/><br/>From the 2024 introduction by guest editor Amber Sparks:<br/>The very-short story writer must take those basic elements of story and crush them down into a very small, dazzling diamond. Small fictions can often be epic, spanning centuries, epochs, geological ages; and keeping them so tightly compressed can lend an air of almost mystic importance, of great and terrible power to describe and remake the world in an instant. When I think about small in art, I think dollhouses, dioramas, miniature portraits. I think Joseph Cornell’s boxes and Walter Potter’s taxidermies. I think of Wes Anderson’s short films and Victorian mourning lockets. In other words, I imagine tight spaces that contain an ocean of story. To me, a small fiction is a planetarium: It contains the whole universe within, and we are all invited to look and look and look. I hope the universe opens to you in this book.