Issue 8.1 of Flash:
The International Short-Short Story Magazine is now available.
It features new stories from
Botswana, Britain, Egypt, France, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Ireland, Japan, South
Africa, Sweden, and the USA.
We are pleased to open with
four pieces by David Swann, whose Stronger
Faster Shorter: Flash Fictions launched our new venture, Flash: The
International Short-Short Story Press. For more information about the
collection and the Press, please visit Flash’s
website. This issue also includes the 2015 winner of the UK’s National Flash
Fiction Youth Competition, ‘Hide and Seek’ by Helen Gurr, a talented A-level
student at Wirral Grammar School for Girls. The competition was organized by Flash and the Department of English,
University of Chester; it was judged by the editors and leading flash author
Vanessa Gebbie.
‘Flash Presents’ contains four pieces – ‘The Interview’, ‘The Goat
Tetherer Attempts to Make History’, ‘The Shortage at the Petting Zoo’, and
‘Storage’ – from Nick Parker’s acclaimed debut collection The Exploding Boy and Other Tiny Tales (2011).
In the ‘Flash Essay’ section, Charlotte Rich connects ‘Kate Chopin’s Very
Short Stories’ to the late-nineteenth-century American author’s longer work.
Alongside the essay, ‘A Very Fine Fiddle’ is reprinted; in Flash, 7.1, you can read ‘A Harbinger’, ‘Doctor Chevalier’s Lie’,
‘Old Aunt Peggy’, and ‘Ripe Figs’.
‘Flash Reviews’ assesses a rich diversity of texts: three chapbooks
(Nuala Ní Chonchúir’s Of
Dublin and Other Fictions,
William Todd Seabrook’s The
Imagination of Lewis Carroll, and
Shellie Zacharia’s Not
Everything Lovely and Strange Is a Dream);
three longer collections (Stuart Dybek’s
Ecstatic Cahoots, James Robertson’s 365, and Avital Gad-Cykman’s Life In, Life Out); and a compendium of five novellas-in-flash with
accompanying craft essays (My Very End of
the Universe, by Tiff Holland, Meg Pokrass, Aaron Teel, Margaret Patton
Chapman, and Chris Bower).
To order a copy of the issue, or to subscribe to the
magazine, go to: http://www.chester.ac.uk/flash.magazine
Peter
Blair and Ashley Chantler (Editors), Department of English, University of
Chester
