"Zen and the Art of House Painting" by Wayne Scheer (Buttonhook Press, 2022)

New and Selected flash, some of it less than 100 words. It's available as a free PDF from the Buttonhook Press site.

• Zen and the Art of House Painting - A naive young house painter seeking wisdom learns from an unwitting painting expert - "With the truly gifted, there is no divide between the mystical and the pragmatic"
• A Family Portrait - A very new grandfather works out his role now.
• A Porcupine Without Quills - "Writing simple sentences was just not up Will's tin ear alley. He continued to meander his way through his story, playing with words like an alcoholic performing an appendectomy of the heart" and so on. Fun.
• A Carefully Planned Evening - "When Karla arrived home the evening Ted died, the house seemed emptier than it had ever been. ... A bottle of pinot rested on its side in the fridge. She had bought it on the way home from the hospital a week earlier in preparation for this evening. ... she'd pour herself a drink, curl up into the overstuffed sofa, pull the afghan Ted had bought her over her legs, and cry like a baby."
• An Old Lady in a Floppy Hat - She's in her garden - "Two young lovers walk by, holding hands and sharing secrets. I snip a rose and offer it to the young woman. ... “Watch the thorns, dear,” I say"
• A Suburban Sunday - 60 y.o. Gil sees his 30 y.o. female neighbour naked. Should he apologise? She seems unconcerned. He recalls when he was 8 and fancied a teacher. His wife calls him in for lunch.
• It’s Not That Funny - He has a fantasy about turning down a naked Penelope Cruz. His wife knows all about it.
• Building a Wall - He builds a wall for protection. His wife asks if it will protect her too, and asks if she can help build it.
• Speed Dial - He'd been over-working. His partner is leaving him. He speed-dials to ask her to come back. He gets through to work.
• Please Hold - Feeling sad, Kate phones her sister, mother and husband, each call going bad very quickly.
• Still Don’t Know What Was in That Drink - "First time I seen her I knew she was the orneriest gal I was ever gonna meet. ... And that’s how me and your grandmama met"
• A Day at the Zoo - "Will spent the morning staring at his blank computer screen. ... He decided to spend a day at the zoo in search of fresh metaphors. ... Soon he was back in his cell, shackled to his computer, typing furiously."
• A Souvenir from Home - he steals a brick from a demolitionsite because he met his girlfriend there.
• Springtime in Mississippi - he's 26, living with his parents, no girlfriend, working in a nursery though he dislikes flowers. When his father asks him to bring home marigolds for the front garden, he does.
• Sweet Cherry - When an ex-girlfriend, now rich and married, asks to meet him, he cuts the meeting short. Too painful.

He's been nominated for at least 5 Pushcart Prizes.

"The best American noir of the century" by Ellroy and Penzler (eds) (Windmill, 2010)

Stories from 1923 to 2007, each preceded by up to a page of detailed notes about the author - Mickey Spillane (who had an interesting life), Ed McBain (who was born "Salvatore A. Lombino" then changed his name to Evan Hunter), Patricia Highsmith (the only woman), etc.

In the introduction, definitions are attempted -

• common features of American noir are "venetian blinds, railroad tracks ... a femme fatale ... menacing alleys, seedy hotel rooms"
• "the two subcategories of the mystery genre, private detective stories and noir fiction, are diametrically opposed, with mutually exclusive philosophical premises. Noir works ... are existential, pessimistic tales about people, including (or especially) protagonists, who are seriously flawed ... the central figures in noir stories are doomed to hopelessness" (Otto Penzler)

A few of the authors were more popular in France than the States. Suicide (not always by the most guilty character) ends a few pieces. Later stories are more literary (not surprising, given that some of the authors are Lit Profs, etc). 1st-person characters admit to being a little strange.

The first story, "Spurs" by Tod Robbins was what the infamous "Freaks" movie (which I've seen) was loosely based on. It says that "Ellroy is arguably the most influential American crime writer of the late twentieth century" - here's a sample - "Mo contracted stomach cancer about that time and got the word: half a decade tops - enjoy life while you can. Cash skimmed off Jerry Katzenbach's books provided class A treatment. Mo held his own against the big C. Jerry K. got bum press for his whorehouse, kiboshed it, and banished Mo to the Coast, where Mickey Cohen welcomed him with open arms, using his juice to get Mo's two statch-rape indiscretions plea-bargained to bubbkis".

I liked Mackinlay Kantor's "Gun Crazy", David Goodis's "Professional Man", Cornell Woolrich's "For the rest of her life" (from 1968 - a leap in sophistication compared to earlier stories), Stephen Greenleaf's "Iris", Lawrence Block's "Like a bone in the throat", and William Gay's "The paperhanger".

"in the debris field" (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2018)

The best 3 novellas-in-flash from 111 competition entries. They're the first I've read of this genre.

"In the Debris Field" by Luke Whisnant

Episodes (4 already published as flash) through the life of a male. My favourite pieces were "Kiss" and ""Later You Find Out ...". Some long titles.

"Latter Day Saints" by Jack Remiel Cottrell

Interviews with saints. Do they have any wisdom to impart? I liked most of them. I'd have liked more over-arching development of the interviewer. "All that is gold" and "Playing to lose" appealed to me most.

"A Slow Boat to Finland" by Victoria Melekian

Little Molly died, running into the road to chase a balloon while her father Steve was beside her. Her organs are offered for transplant. Mother Kat has sister Allison to console her. Her demented mother thinks Molly is still alive. Kat talks to Molly at her grave. 7 months later they meet parents of an organ recipient. Kat hears Molly's heart beating. Kat hasn't gone back to work. Steve thinks that's a bad idea. They have counselling. Kat ignores the advice and continues secretly meeting Claire (the mother) and her daughter Olivia (4) each week - "thinking about Molly's heart inside this little girl named Olivia calms her down. She likes knowing it's there. Like finding a lucky penny and carrying it in your pocket all day". One chapter is Claire's first-person PoV.

There are some standard sections, topped off with imagery that doesn't always save the section - e.g. "Steve feels like he's seeing her through the wrong end of the binoculars, she's close yet he can't reach her". Steve thinks it's too early to think about having another child. Claire's husband phones Steve, saying that Kat is visiting unannounced. Kat visits her mother, taking Olivia, pretending she's Molly. Rather than return Olivia, Kat gets her an ice-cream and they sit in the car. Police are involved. There's a misunderstanding and Steve is held at gunpoint. Claire's very understanding. At the end, months later, Kat consoles a pair at a meeting and feels better.

Of the 3, this is much the most moving and the one most like a novel. I suppose that explains why the parts are least like flash. "Soggy Goldfish" and "Send a Lifeboat" don't do enough. "Dear Claire" is a letter from Kat, never sent. I don't know how it helps the NiF - much of it repeats earlier info. And is Allison needed?

Other reviews

• AnnaLee Barclay ("In the Debris Field": These small, quiet tragedies that mark everyday human life are navigated by Dennis, a sensitive boy whose nonlinear memories thread together seemingly random instances that come together as a whole portrait of the pains that quietly mark us throughout our lives, particularly adolescence. ... "Latter Day Saints": This highly unique novella asks us to dig into our own perceptions of the world and how it operates as we struggle with our own personal journeys. ... ""A Slow Boat to Finland": Melekian’s prose is strong and blunt, yet there is a dreamy lyricism to it that carries Kat through the sort of brain-fog that comes after trauma)
• Judy Darling

"Father myself" by James McDermott (Nine arches press, 2025)

Poems from Dreich, Atrium, Southword, Poetry Wales, Magma, Cardiff Review, etc.

It's rather short compared to NAP's usual books - 54 pages, with several poems that are 6 lines or less.

The poems deal with his father's COVID death. Among the observations that appear in other hospital pieces (tubes being pulled out, etc) there are phrases that catch the eye. In "Fight", with his father fighting for breath, he's the "pround parent cheering you at sports day", like how his father used to urge him on. The ending is

[] strong mind wouldn't beat weak body I stop wailing at you       replace the mask to hold your hand in mine      as cold and thin as gold medal       neither of us could win

I like the comparison that's made, and the way the hands meet. It's in couplets, the final one rhyming. Most of the poem's lines are 10 syllabled, many of them (though not the last) iambic (imitating the father's breath? I doubt it). Using gaps (that only sometimes replace punctuation) seems unhelpfully poetic to me, as does the removal of "the" before "gold". The gaps and the omission of "the" happens in other poems too, sometimes. In this poem why not remove the "the" before "mask" as well? And the "as" before "cold" isn't needed.

"Fit as a fiddle" ends with

[] boasting I'm fit as a fiddle    your strings have snapped your neck was trached    your body ventilated now your song's stopped and I hear violins

It's a sonnet. The syllabic pattern is closely observed this time. The title doesn't seem optimal and the ending sounds contrived.

In "Chapel of Rest" a theme re-appears (as do the non-punctuation gaps)

[] swollen cheeks rouged    like mine aged twelve when you lost me in Mum's make-up    called me sissy

Stanza 3 of "Shauny Bubble" is

I clock you erupt in boiling water as I stir two a.m. tea in your Best Dad mug   I clock you trapped in a spirit level still reminding me I'm not straight

What does the first line mean? Syntax is deliberately disrupted, but why? And what has a spirit level to do with straightness?

In "Mug", "grief has made me mug with hole in". Here, "mug" isn't a verb. The narrator feels as useless as a mug (a gullible person?) with a hole in it. Why the disruption? And do mugs have holes? They crack don't they?

For me, the style in poems like "Chapel of Rest" is uneasily close to being prose, as if they began as prose and were then given a poetry once-over. And it's difficult dealing with this topic without in some way repeating what others have done (I note that Paul Stephenson is mentioned on the "Thanks" page). Poems on p.32, p.35, p.42, p.44 sound familiar.

Why does "Virus" have "the TV/ shows you Richard of York give battle in vain" (why "give" rather than "gave" (to match the saying) or "giving" (to match the syntax)?

The most telling lines are often saved for the endings - a photo frame is a "six by four-inch casket"; "we are all lit fuses"; "we didn't say/ too much father    like gods we spoke through acts"; "I throw in your towel    wonder if you did".

The penultimate poem "James" pulls together the strands relating to the father's attitude to his son's sexuality. At 6 the narrator identified more with the spangly Spice Girls than James Bond. At 16, the narrator comes out and the father turns his back. When the narrator's 26 the father asks if he's dating and then says he had a bi brother called James who killed himself. I don't think we need to be told at the end that "James comes from Hebrew name Jacob/ which means to supplant    to take the place of".

I liked "Black Wheelbarrow" most.

"Best British Short Stories 2025" by Nicholas Royle (ed) (Salt, 2025)

In his longer than usual introduction, Royle

• lists 15 UK book publishers of stories
• lists 14 UK printed magazines that contain stories (I don't know "Extra Teeth", "Open Pen" and "Remains")
• writes that "Extra Teeth" and "Confingo" send him all their issues. Some authors send him the publication they're in. He sometimes asks for publications.
• writes that sometimes when he's tried to include stories by well-known writers they've not replied or have asked for £900.
• lists some magazines he misses - Ambit, Panurge, Warwick Review, etc

The majority of the pieces come from books, the other sources being Fictive Dream, The Brussels Review, Thin Skin, BBC (3), New Worlds, and Confingo.

• "I'm in love with a German film star" (C.D. Rose) - Some music tracks listed, all with some connection (real or imagined) to Magda (who may have been a spy, who may have married 4 times, who may not have existed).
• "Torsos" (Linden Hibbert) - a male detective visits a museum where a surly female curator shows him the torso room (where a torso had been damaged with a blunt instrument), the leg room, etc. He draws the evidence. Later he returns and finds the culprit foot outside. The smell (and here the story ends) gave him a yearning for "an outcome that could not happen. Like taking a stroll in the evening, he thought. Like wanting a child of your own. Or falling in love."
• "The incidents" (Wyl Menmuir) - From birth, animals (bees, snakes, etc) seem to be attracted to Blue. When she's 15 her father dies. She and her mother Emmaline go to Cornwall. Blue hopes to meet Daphne du Maurier there. Emmaline want to meet old friend David, who now has a wife and 2 sons. They go by car, the ocean "unrealistically blue against the green of the fields". On the beach, while the boys wrestle and David is in deep conversation with Emmaline, Blue walks unnoticed into the sea, the whales' calls sounding like home.
• "The headteacher" (Okechukwu Nzelu) - A married couple, Jeremy (his PoV, a lawyer) and Matthew (popular head of a group of schools), are in their mid-fifties. They haven't had sex for a while. It's Matthew's retirement party in their house. His colleagues and ex-students attend. Mrs P helped/coached Matthew through his career, giving him the authority and confidence that Jeremy couldn't provide. Nathan, in his 30s, had been in Matthew's drama club. Jeremy knows about drama clubs. Nathan complains about the broken shower in his expensive flat, not realising that the flat is Jeremy and Matthew's nest egg. [ I was hoping it would have more analysis (from Jeremy's PoV) of the influences on (and development of) Matthew's persona, more regrets. It's a bit too plotty/info-dumpy for me at the moment.]
• "Dŵr" (Catrin Kean) - Someone just misses their Welsh father's funeral. They have the key to his house. It's raining. They haven't seen the father for years - he was never part of their life. Next morning a neighbour delivers his dog. The dog takes the narrator on a walk to a waterfall - the water says "dŵr" ("water" in Welsh, about the only word the father has taught them). A stream back leads under the house, In the kitchen there's a trapdoor leading to a cellar which the stream runs through. There's a table, 2 chairs and glasses, a bottle of whisky. The ending is "And then I heard, just behind me, a sigh. A breath. And I knew he was here, and he knew I had come".
• "A fictional detective" (Elizabeth Stott) - "It seems he is created only to solve the endless crimes of fiction." He hopes one day that things will be different, that a train ride will just be a train ride, that he can spend a night in a hotel without notes being slipped under the door. 5 pages.
• "Junction" (Christopher Burns) - 2 men meet on a park bench. It soon becomes obvious that one (whose PoV it is) is the older version of the other. The older one doesn't want to reveal anything (for fear of changing his past) but perhaps he does. He learns afterwards that near the time of the meeting, the younger version is killed in a car accident. He muses on the consequences of this, then begins to fade away.
• "Fabrication" (Imogen Reid) - a description of a room (or of a picture of the room) in Robbe-Grillet style, with line-breaks that isolate a word/phrase that ends a sentence and starts another. I think.
• "Flatten the curve" (Naomi Wood) - Deborah (with husband Cal, 6 y.o. daughter Zara, and a baby) is in lockdown. Andrei, Julia and 6 y.o. Joey live next door. Zoom, phone-calls in the garden, and childcare are a struggle for Deb. Zara flirts with Joey. Deb fancies Andrei (who's a meat-eater, unlike Cal, and sneaks off to play poker - Cal's covid-vulnerable). One night she cooks meat, angering Cal. She stays up late, drinks a bottle or 2 of wine. Next morning Joey charges in and cuddles Zara. Andrei comes to collect him. Deborah tells him to go away.
• "You" (Roger Luckhurst) - The collective narrator follows the life of "You", a child who's like cracked vessel, the cracks just the right size for the narrators to squeeze through. You struggle through school, have a tempestuous adolescence, wonder about spiritualism. The ending is "This is how it will be until you join us, and we begin again the search for another vessel"
• "Lord of the fruit flies" (Pippa Goldschmidt) - Herman Muller is carrying vials of flies. He's been zig-zagging arond the world because of his political views. He hasn't seen his son for 4 years. He's on a train to Edinburgh, sharing the carriage with a female farm vet and a war-time refugee boy. [Is that it?]
• "Laughter ever after" (Mark Valentine) - he's a collector. He takes a rural bus to Biggleswade in seach of a rare leaflet about the singer of "The Laughing Policeman". A gust of wind enlivens the quiet town square. He lets the wind take him over. He's exhilarated, in ecstasy. There's booming laughter.
• "Helium" (David Bevan) - A sad OAP's on a country walk alone. He's spent his life alone. He sees a silver-clad figure on the other side of the lake and walks round to it. He thinks over a new love - his first. They'd slept together. He wonders why he put her off by not wanting to meet her friends. When he reaches the figure it's only "L" and "O" helium balloons. Valentine's Day has just happened. The balloons blow away.
• "The ice tigs" (Rose Biggin) - A single male who gets a temp admin job at a university has problems with bad circulation, maybe triggered by encounters with a ghost. [No]
• "The portal in Lisbon" (Baret Magarian) - From BBC radio 4. Peter, an English lecturer, a man whose friends have married and abandoned him, whose mother has recently died, who had a scooter accident, who's been pick-picketed, goes to Lisbon for a break. He attends an ethnic music concert in a cellar, hoping it will lift his spirits. "Peter could not rid himself of the impression that reality had somehow changed ... He just wanted the music to make him insensate or to restore some spark of life after all the bruises and loneliness life had bequeathed him". After, he's told that the cellar is a museum that doesn't host concerts. Well, well. [No]
• "When viewed from the head rather than the foot" (Simon Okotie) - 6.5 pages. One sentence. One paragraph - "such that the angle subtended by the upper and lower legs would progressively decrease in proportion to that decreasing distance" etc.
• "Flight of the albatross" (Hannah Hoare) - In Turkey a young man takes tourists tandem paragliding. One day his passenger falls to his death. A year later his father tells tourists that his son flies like an albatross - "Albatross flies for joy and finds all he needs up there. He sees the world below and knows he cannot be happy down here."
• "Ghost walks" (Ian Critchley) - Sarah and Tom revisit a town they last went to over 30 years before, when they first slept together. Back then, she'd stood at their window and a woman below waved and stepped back into traffic. No injury. Tom apologies again about something. Next day, alone, she finds herself at the B&B they'd stay at before. She sees a face at the window and steps back into traffic. No injury. She returns to her hotel room, stands at the window. No woman waves back. She collects her things and leaves.
• "Under the flyover" (Iain Sinclair) - 27 pages of sporadically interesting text, with surrealism being a leit-motif. I know something about David Gascoyne, Ballard, "New Worlds", Burroughs, London, etc. Even so, I can't help feeling it should be several pages shorter. Here's an extract - "To be walking with wombats, wind-surfing salt deserts, coupling in non-judgemental sexual bliss under a weightless waterfall, swooping like a killer drone through the private apartments of the Vatican, under stupendous ceilings manfully toshed into a steroidal superhero drama by Michelangelo ... The orbital motorway, turning octopus sprawl into a traffic island, was elastic. Sometimes stretching to accommodate a pregnancy of private estated and revamped asylums, sometimes biting hard like a whale-bone corset"
• "The junction" (Alison Moore) - Paul, driving home to his ill mother after a week away, is hit by a car. The driver, Neville (a widower), invites him to his nearby village house. Paul's fiancee has changed her mind. The pick-up lorry doesn't come. He has to stay the night. He's well looked after. Next day he finds his car in pieces in the garage, and a dead woman in a bed. He discusses with Neville how to spend the day.

Ghost/gothic stories easily predominate over mainstream. The well-crafted New Yorker story is far away. It feels less representative than usual.

"And we lived happily ever after" by Karen Jones and Christopher Drew (eds) (National Flash Fiction Day, 2022)

The theme was "Freedom". As usual with this series, many interesting pieces. My favourite was "Curriculum Vitae" (Audrey Niven) followed by "Kite" (Cathy Lennon) and "A Sin to See Through Glass" (Rosaleen Lynch).

"Western Lane" by Chetna Maroo

An audio book. Shortlisted For The Booker Prize 2023.

The first-person narrator Gopi is an 11 y.o. girl with sisters Cush (13) and Mona (15). Their mother, who spoke little English, died a year before the main action. They're Jains. The extended family and friends check that they're still being culturally strict. They live in London. Their childless aunt and uncle who live in Edinburgh wonder about adopting them. The girls think that a single mother may be after their father. Their father (a freelance electrician) encourages them to find long-term interests. She does squash intensely. She's better than her sisters, who soon give up. She learns about the legendary Khan dynasty of players. At "Western Lane", a sports centre, she meet Ged, a 13 y.o. who's lost his stutter and is a useful playing partner (with her father's permission). She has her first period. She's entered into a 2-day tournament in Durham, encouraged by Maqsud, a businessman. She fantasises about a possible contender - someone who gave up school to focus on squash. She starts having reciprocated feelings for Ged.

Ged's mother brings food. She and Pa smoke together in the back garden. He's neglecting work. The quiet father's chances of conquering grief at times seems dependent on Gopi's success. Her sister buys her a new racket.

The squash metaphors are mostly obvious albeit relevant - shadowing (practising without a ball); identifying opponents' weaknesses. They watch a recording of a player whose shots are so perfect that you forget what you're thinking when you see them. Pa seems to communicate with her only via squash. Her mother's sometimes mentioned - used by people who want Gopi [not] to do things.

Pa plays with her - the first time in months. She hits him in the face with her racket when doing a stroke she shouldn't have tried. She'd played with Ged many times without touching him. Pa tells her to control her emotions. Ged's mother doesn't want Ged to play with her any more.

The sisters see Pa talking to mother and, worried, call their Edinburgh relatives. They come down and Gopi goes back with them. The aunt doesn't want her to continue with squash. Her uncle changes the aunt's mind. We find out little about her months in Edinburgh prior to the tournament. When they all meet up outside Durham for the tournament there's little about what the sisters discuss. Ged is there. 8 girls are in her age group and she wins (£20), playing the final with 40 spectators in a specially constructed perspex-walled court in a badminton hall.

The voice is way beyond that of an 11 y.o., both in terms of the language and the emotions - "it was as if the walls existed outside of time". She knows what people are thinking. All this gives the story the feel of fable, the realistic portrayal of people secondary. Much is missed out that surely matters to Gopi. And why wait all that time and go all the way to Durham for a tournament?

Other reviews

• Caleb Klaces (In her mother’s absence, Gopi makes herself physical on the squash court. ... With Pa, she spends hours “ghosting”, which means playing with something crucial missing – the ball ... the almost inexpressible experience of a human body negotiating a transparent box ... Pa is searching for something more than Gopi can provide, and Gopi knows that this makes him vulnerable. In order to win, she needs to remember what he has taught her, and go beyond what he can express.)
• Ivy Pochoda
• lauratfrey (this shortlisted book struck me as very “debut-y” ... Two trusted reviewers [] don’t feel that way. ... The things I found trite or formulaic, they found “accessible with hidden depths” ... I felt like I could see the plot outline underneath the finished product, like if I could go back to an earlier draft, I’d see a note: “insert squash metaphor here.” In fact, all eight chapters begin with a squash metaphor. They were well written, but to me, utterly obvious in what they were meant to convey about grief, and after the first few chapters I was sick of them. ... I gasped at a pivotal moment [] But even this moment makes me feel like I can see a ghostly Google doc comment like “put an obstacle in the character’s way before she gets to the final battle.”)