Literary reviews by Tim Love.
Warning: Rather than reviews, these are often notes in preparation for reviews that were never finished, or pleas for help with understanding pieces. See Litref Reviews - a rationale for details.

Wednesday 25 February 2015

"Flash V7.2 (Oct 2014)" by Peter Blair and Ashley Chantler (eds)

A magazine devoted to Flash, containing 46 stories (max 360 words), some in translation. There are also 4 stories by Virginia Woolf, an essay, and 5 reviews (each with a sample story). No bios. This issue appeared in Feb 2015. It's a twice-yearly publication - see their website for details.

The pieces are prose - they wouldn't be mistaken for prose-poems. One story's about 110 words long, but the others are much closer to the maximum. There's no telegramese - indeed, on p.9 there's the rather wordy "She'd ... eliminated her Spiritual Room. She claimed she wasn't telling fortunes anymore. 'My psychic days are over. You want a prediction, ask someone else'."

I didn't notice any Formulist pieces or anything very non-mainstream (Woolf's pieces being exceptions). I read some parts of each story twice, in the way I read poems, and didn't read many of them at a single sitting. Some had provocative first sentences. Just a few pieces (e.g. p.38) had punchlines. More had a final sentence that was discontinuous with the preceding one. Sometimes I didn't understand the ending.

I liked p.6, p.11, p.17, p.49, p.54 and p.75. p.26 sounded too much like a stripped-down journal entry. I wasn't keen on p.30 and p.37. My favourite story is "Rich" by Louise Ihringer.

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