"Sleeping" by Katharine Weber. By Katharine Weber She would not have to change a diaper, they said.
In fact, she would not have to do anything at all. Mrs.Winter said that Charles would not wake while she and Mr. Flash Fiction. Flash Fiction Stories: Micro, Sudden, Postcard or Very Short Stories. This page compiles many examples of flash fiction, sudden fiction, micro stories, very short stories, or postcard fiction as they are sometimes called.
A link is provided for easy online reading. I don’t think any story on this page exceeds 1,000 words, and most are much shorter. Most, if not all, of these stories have been anthologized, suggesting they have either literary merit or entertainment value. While these stories weren’t written for students, I think they are a good pool of stories for teachers to choose from. Not all the stories are appropriate for students of all ages. Brilliant Silence | Spencer Holst Two Alaskan Kodiak bears are part of a travelling circus act. Read “Brilliant Silence” Pumpkins | Francine Prose A truck full of pumpkins collides with a car, killing the female driver. Read “Pumpkins” The Stones | Richard Shelton.
Gate A-4 – Live & Learn. Gate A-4 By Naomi Shihab Nye: Wandering around the Albuquerque Airport Terminal, after learning my flight had been delayed four hours, I heard an announcement: “If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A-4 understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately.”
Well— one pauses these days. Gate A-4 was my own gate. I went there. An older woman in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing. I stooped to put my arm around the woman and spoke haltingly. We called her son, I spoke with him in English. She was laughing a lot by then. Then the airline broke out free apple juice and two little girls from our flight ran around serving it and they were covered with powdered sugar too. And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought, This is the world I want to live in. This can still happen anywhere. Notes: Image Source: imeu.org. The Orange. Hemingway. Best Animated Short, SXSW 2010. How to Set a House on Fire. ENGL 71: Creative Writing: Flash Fiction. How to set a House on Fire Stace Budzko.
Stuart Dybek's "Sunday at the Zoo": A Class in Narrative Structure - Lee Martin. When I was teaching at the Vermont College of Fine Arts Postgraduate Writers’ Conference, I offered a class on narrative structure that used Stuart Dybek’s short-short story, “Sunday at the Zoo,” as an example.
If you’re interested, you can find the story in the first edition of Sudden Fiction, edited by Robert Shapard and James Thomas. I’ve long admired this story for how quickly and gracefully it moves from an initial premise to complications that resolve themselves with a resonance grounded in irony. I admire what this story has to show us about constructing narratives. We decided to stop drinking and spend Sunday at the zoo. Flash Fiction Narrative Analysis: Katharine Weber's "Sleeping" : FlashFiction.Net. [Editor’s Note: We are grateful to Lee Martin’s article “Stuart Dybek’s ‘Sunday at the Zoo’: A Class in Narrative Structure,” an article that served as our own model for the structure of the narrative analysis essay of short short fiction.]
Katharine Weber’s flash piece “Sleeping” jumped out at me for the expert way Weber brings the reader to realization at the end about the true nature of these characters. The story can be found in Vestal Review and Sudden Flash Youth, edited by Christine Perkins-Hazuka, Tom Hazuka, and Mark Budman. As writers, we should strive to structure our own stories as masterfully as Weber does here. She develops the story with the use of backstory and small clues that foreshadow what is truly going on. The way that Weber quietly develops the story to the end and has the reader come to a sudden realization just at the moment young Harriet does is a structure that we should try to use in our own writing. Sunday at the zoo and billys girl. To Reduce Your Likelihood of Murder. Dave Eggers' short short stories. Excerpt: A Coming-of-Age Reader for the ADD'd. On Dec. 15, Persea Books releases an anthology of short-short coming-of-age stories called Sudden Fiction Youth, featuring 65 tales of no more than 1000 words each, selected by editors Christine Perkins-Hazuka, Tom Hazuka, and Mark Budman.
Authors include Steve Almond, Meg Kearny, Dave Eggers, and PW's very own Craig Morgan Teicher. In this exclusive excerpt, Persea shares three of these stories with the Tip Sheet. Currents. Fiction: The Orange, by Benjamin Rosenbaum. By Benjamin Rosenbaum An orange ruled the world. It was an unexpected thing, the temporary abdication of Heavenly Providence, entrusting the whole matter to a simple orange. The orange, in a grove in Florida, humbly accepted the honor. The other oranges, the birds, and the men in their tractors wept with joy; the tractors' motors rumbled hymns of praise.