The twelfth issue of Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine is now available.
It features new stories from Australia, Belgium, Britain,
Canada, Ethiopia, France, India, Ireland, Sri Lanka, and the USA. It opens with
the winner of the UK’s inaugural National Flash Fiction Youth Competition
(2014), ‘Unborn’ by Seeun Choi, a talented A-level student at Cardiff Sixth
Form College. The competition was organized by Flash and the Department of English, University of Chester; it was
judged by the editors and leading flash-author David Gaffney. For further
information and to read the two runners-up, see Flash’s website.
The issue’s ‘Flash
Presents’ section contains four pieces – ‘A Harbinger’, ‘Doctor Chevalier’s
Lie’, ‘Old Aunt Peggy’, and ‘Ripe Figs’ – by Kate Chopin (1850–1904), a writer
of subtle and often poignant fiction set mostly in 1870s and 1880s Louisiana,
in the post-Civil War American South.
In the third-ever ‘Flash
Essay’, ‘Samuel Beckett’s Faint Fiction’, Tim Lawrence reminds us that the
great playwright and novelist was also author of haunting, lyrical fragments
that might best be regarded as flashes. Alongside the essay, ‘The Cliff’ is
reprinted, translated from Beckett’s original French.
‘Flash Reviews’
ranges from the humorous (Flash Fiction
Funny) to the serious (Flashes of War),
the masculine (Beasts and Men) to the
feminine (The Kind of Girl), and
concludes with a novella-in-flashes (Liliane’s
Balcony). Each review is accompanied by a sample story.
To order a copy of the issue, or to subscribe to the
magazine, visit the website:
