Reviews of Flash collections

Single-author collections

A

• "Other household toxins" by Christopher Allen (Matter Press, 2018) [This book shows it's possible to take risks and still succeed. All but 2 of the pieces have been previously published, which is a good start. There's variety along several dimensions]

B

• "Dancing alone and other lessons" by Digby Beaumont (2020) [In "letting go" (my favourite section) I liked "Who Knew More Than Karen Carpenter About a Broken Heart?" In general, starts are much better than endings.]
• "Kiss kiss" by Paul Beckman (Truth Serum Press, 2019) [It begins well, with "With a Wink and a Nod", a story that a few reviewers single out. It feels more like a collected than a carefully selected set of pieces]

C

• "Now you see him" by Tim Craig (AdHoc fiction, 2022) [That so many categories are required attests to the variety and interest. My favourites include "Cat Barbecue", "Northern Lights", "Now You See Him", "Heir", "Peacocks", "That's All There Is, There Ain't No More"]

D

• "Spaghetti Fiction" by Phil Doran (garlic press, 2007) [I least like the longest pieces. "The Legions of Burnt Toast" and "Passive Addictive" (about being addicted to passive smoking) are fun ideas.]
• "You're Not Supposed to Cry" by Gary Duncan (Vagabond Voices, 2017) [I was impressed by the consistent quality. There's humour, disappointment, and human interest. No bravura passages, no knockouts, just good person-centred writing]

G

• "Aromabingo" by David Gaffney (Salt, 2007) [Nothing ostentaciously literary. Even when stories didn't work for me, there were interesting details and twists. Later in the book, some stories are over 10 pages long. I think these stories are more consistently good than the earlier ones.]
• "The Half-Life of Songs" by David Gaffney (Salt, 2010) [There were only a few repeated themes - art museums and pursed lips, love interest thrown in to add human interest.]
• "Nothing to worry about" by Vanessa Gebbie (Flash: The International Short-Short Story Press, 2018) [My favourites are "Birds are like that", "Wei-Ch'i", "Navigation", "Reeds", "Three stages in learning to fly" and "Shibuya Intersection".]
• "A short history of synchronised breathing" by Vanessa Gebbie (Cultured Llama Publishing, 2017) [Non-standard though several of the pieces may be, they're all accessible, set recognisably in France, the Far East, Brighton, Prague, etc. No tear-jerkers, though lots of wry humour. Whatever criteria you classify texts by (narrative distance, metafictionality, realism, essay/story, etc), you'll find texts in this book that span a range.]
• "Ed's wife and other stories" by Vanessa Gebbie (Liquorice Fish, 2015) [Square format. About 60 pieces, named after animals - the wife being portrayed in various guises. Most pieces have one piece of dialogue commencing with "Suze". Each one-page piece (some are shorter than 50 words; one is 10 words long) is accompanied by one-page line drawing by Lynn Roberts. My favourite part is the final sequence - "Three stages in learning to fly"]
• "the cuban club" by Barry Gifford (Seven Stories Press, 2018) [71 stories (from Narrative, Zoetrope All-story, etc) spread over 240 pages, featuring young Roy in fifties Chicago. They're not time-ordered - on p.71 he's 19 and he's been in Europe for 2 years. In other stories he's not yet 10. It's difficult to know where to draw the line, but I think the book should have been far shorter. "The way of all flesh" might be my favourite. ]

H

• "My Mother was an Upright Piano" by Tania Hershman (Tangent, 2012) [There's often a 3-part structure, and the SF guideline of changing only one feature of reality (or conventionality) at a time is commonly adhered to.]
• "Clearly defined clouds" by Jude Higgins (AdHoc, 2024) [At a launch I attended she read "Clearly defined clouds", "Princess", "The Final Quadrant" and "Before the diggers come". She pointed out that there are quite a few child PoVs, and several pieces based on fairy tales.]
• "The Evolution of Birds" by Sara Hills (Adhoc, 2021) [A good read. I'm especially impressed that they've all been written since 2019.]

M

• "The yet unknowing world" by Fiona J. Mackintosh (Adhoc, 2021) [Too low-key/subtle for me. I liked "The cardboard box of happiness", "Siren", "Snow falling upwards", "Consanguinity" and "The shape of things to come" the most.]

P

• "Alligators in the Night" by Meg Pokrass (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2018) [Situations abound where the status of a relationship is changing - first dates especially, the main character (always female?) in want of a relationship, lacking the skills to find one. There are also many pets, breasts, freckles and dogs that sniff at guests. The idea of eloping to Alaska appears in 3 stories, lice in thrift shops appearing in 2. I felt that sometimes stories tried rather too hard to repeatedly surprise. Overall the book kept me interested.]
• "This alone could save us" by Santino Prinzi (Ad Hoc, 2020) [Most of the pieces work for me. The few that don't I can imagine other people liking. . Stories are 2 lines to 4 pages long, set in various countries. There are loners, couples and extended families. There are wives regretting being married, gays of various ages who are in different stages of coming out. There's snow (the most common symbol), pets, fridges, old and young people.]

S

• "Zen and the Art of House Painting" by Wayne Scheer (Buttonhook Press, 2022) [New and Selected flash, some of it less than 100 words. He's been nominated for at least 5 Pushcart Prizes.]
• "Seeds of Stars" by Richard Stimac (Buttonhook Press, 2024) [A chapbook of 13 Flash pieces. Kids are often discussing grown-up (even spiritual) ideas. Sometimes adults are trying to explain something important to them. Symbolism is often explicit, the author or characters explaining it.]

W

• "All the bananas I've never seen" by Tony Williams (Salt) [All have narratives, the narrational duration being anything from minutes to years, but there's always some backstory - it's not prose poetry. ]

Novellas-in-Flash

• "in the debris field" (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2018) [The best 3 novellas-in-flash from 111 competition entries - "In the Debris Field" by Luke Whisnant, "Latter Day Saints" by Jack Remiel Cottrell and "A Slow Boat to Finland" by Victoria Melekian]

Anthologies/Magazines

• "the lobsters run free (bath flash fiction 2)" (Ad Hoc, 2017) [135 pieces out of the 2,500+ entries sent in for the year's competitions, with various judges. Nothing bland or minimalist - if I don't always get what's going on, it's often because there's too much going on.]
• "things left and found by the side of the road (bath flash fiction 3)" (Ad Hoc, 2018) [135 stories from the year's 2,755 entries to 3 competitions. I like "The Pink" (p.61), "Birds in the Thames" (p.62) and "Every love story is a ghost story" (p.87). "The Witness" (p.128) is the kind of piece that non-Flashers can immediately appreciate: the plot has emotion plus symbolism, and there are carefully crafted phrases - a man is described as a "creature that subsisted on petrol station gin and only ever slithered away from the glow of the television to breed."]
• "With one eye on the cows - Bath Flash Fiction Volume Four" (2019) [137 stories chosen from 3,123 entered for their 2019 competitions. Sharon Teller's "Her safe word is 'circus'" is perhaps the least mainstream. I liked "Show falling upwards" and many others - generally a good standard.]
• "Flash Fiction Festival one" (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2017) [Nothing especially striking. There were a few pieces that I didn't understand.]
• "Flash Fiction Festival two" (AdHoc fiction, 2018) [“Oh baby” is my favourite piece in the book]
• "Flash fiction festival six" (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2023) [An anthology of Flash mostly by Flash Festival Bristol 2023 attendees. Of the 80 pieces (many inspired by the workshops), about 18 are by men. My favourites included "A Foreign Place" and "Barbie Arm", reprints by experts Kathy Fish and Nancy Stohlman.]
• "Flash fiction festival seven" by Jude Higgins and Diane Simmons (eds) (Ad Hoc, 2024) [My favourite piece was "The Poet's Wife" by Jupiter Jones, followed by "The Map of Desire" by Fiona McKay.]
• "Sleep is a beautiful colour (NFFD anthology 2017)" by Santino Prinzi and Meg Pokrass (eds) (NFFD, 2017) [ My favourites were "Sleep is a beautiful colour" (Helen Rye), "Let Robot Lawnmower Work. Enjoy your life!" (Danielle McLaughlin), "Legs in the air, we think about spring" (Angela Readman), "The complete and incomplete works of Lydia Davis" (Ingrid Jendrzejewski), "Weather girl" (Robert Shapard) and "There's no such thing as a fish" (Jude Higgins).]
• "Root, Branch, Tree (NFFD anthology 2020)" by Sophie van Llewyn and Ingrid Jendrzejewski (eds) (NFFD, 2020) [My favourites were "Flock" (Nuala O'Connor), "This is how it starts" (Sara Hills), and "Rock Pools" (Jonathan Cardew)]
• "And we lived happily ever after" by Karen Jones and Christopher Drew (eds) (National Flash Fiction Day, 2022) [My favourite was "Curriculum Vitae" (Audrey Niven) followed by "Kite" (Cathy Lennon) and "A Sin to See Through Glass" (Rosaleen Lynch)]
• "Scratching the sands" (National Flash Fiction Day, 2023) [An anthology of Flash with the shortlist of Microfiction at the end. The theme was Time. Favourites include "1969" and especially "You Die First"]
• "51 and a half" by Vanessa Gebbie (Ad Hoc, 2023) [Workshop exercises, with some of the results]
• "Flash Fiction" by James Thomas, Denise Thomas and Tom Hazuka (eds) (Norton, 1992) [My favourites were "The Stones" by Richard Shelton, "Jane" by Steven Molen, "Bread" by Margaret Atwood, and "A Chronicler's Sin" by Pavao Pavlicić.]
• "Flash V7.2 (Oct 2014)" by Peter Blair and Ashley Chantler (eds) [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.]
• "Barely Casting a Shadow" (Reflex Fiction, 2018) [161 Flash stories, all long-listed for the first four rounds of their competition. Few knock-outs. Many lesser pleasures. I like "Mornings", "Replenished" and "No time for stories".]
• “Flash Fusion” (Dahlia Press, 2024) [Flash and interviews involving 24 South Asian writers, most of them supplying 3 pieces. All the stories have been previously published]
• "Stories on the go" by Andrew Ashling (ed) (2014) [Too many pieces read like extracts, or sequences of events without shape. In the "Romance" stories the main character usually begins with a wish that at the end comes true. I expected the pieces categorised as "Literary Fiction" to suit me best. It wasn't so. An exception is "Words by Bob Summer" which has a little twist at the end, but is noteworthy for its portrayal of character]
• "Nevertheless she persisted" (Tom Doherty Associates Book, 2020) [Sometimes the writing fails, sometimes the plot does. I'm not into fantasy, which doesn't help. "Anabasis" by Amal El-Mohtar is perhaps my favourite.]