American Flash Fiction: An Anthology

The biggest and best collection of American flash fiction ever assembled reveals the very big imaginative possibilities of very short stories

Featuring 100 genre-spanning and form-bending stories, spanning 160+years; includes literary fiction, speculative fiction, noir, satire, surrealism, humor, horror, parables, fables, and more.

This landmark Library of America anthology 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 it 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, Ray Bradbury, 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.David L. Ulin is a professor of English at the University of Southern California, where he edits the journal Air/Light. He is the former book editor and book critic of the Los Angeles Times. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, he is the author or editor of more than twenty books, including Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, The Lost Art of Reading: Books and Resistance in a Troubled Time, and, most recently, the novel Thirteen Question Method. For Library of America, he has edited Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology and The Joan Didion Collection.