American flash fiction: an anthology

Published by Library of America, 2026-09-22

"For discerning readers with short attention spans, this landmark collection presents the best of a century and a half of American storytelling and literary innovation-in 100 bite-sized pieces from 100 wildly diverse and distinguished authors. Celebrating the artful brevities of flash fiction from Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, and Zora Neale Hurston to Donald Barthelme, Lydia Davis, and Diane Williams, it recovers some of the little-understood history of the very short story before "flash fiction" was invented, and gathers the brilliant work of a score of emerging contemporary writers too. Here are winners of the Nobel Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Award (Ernest Hemingway, William Carlos Williams, John Steinbeck, Alice Walker, Tim O'Brien); hard-boiled crime writers (Dashiell Hammett, David Goodis); speculative fiction writers (H.P. Lovecraft, Djuna Barnes, Richard Matheson, Damon Knight, Sofia Samatar); voices of the Harlem Renaissance (Jean Toomer, Wallace Thurman, Dorothy West, Langston Hughes); surrealists; prose poets; memoirists; experimental writers; and many more, all of them with stories that reveal worlds and startle the imagination in the space of a few pages. Introduced by acclaimed writer, critic, and anthologist David L. Ulin, who explores the origins and creative range of the form, the collection also includes notes on the stories and contributors, and an index"--