Over in a blink, the best flash fiction lingers like phosphenes in the mind’s eye, its language and meaning reverberating long after the story ends. In the forthcoming Library of America volume American Flash Fiction, one hundred of the greatest practitioners of this short, luminous form—from Mark Twain to Venita Blackburn—prove that brevity is no barrier to depth. Masterpieces of compression and ambiguity, these works showcase a vein of American literature that remains vital, rendering a moment of readerly attention momentous.
Below, volume editor David L. Ulin discusses the flash fiction genre in all its range and complexity, encompassing its ancient origins, fascinating evolution, and ongoing importance to the literary landscape. No flash in the pan, the minuscule pieces in this anthology contain multitudes for readers to unlock.
LOA: What was the inspiration for this anthology, and what drew you to flash fiction as a form?
David L. Ulin: It’s a misunderstood form. Because of its brevity, it tends to get overlooked, when in fact that brevity allows for a lot of movement and leeway, innovation and experimentation. One of the things that’s most resonant to me about flash is that it can blur genre lines and classifications. It’s a place where genres come together and overlap.
There’s a personal component here, too, which is that a couple months before I started working on the anthology, my mother died. That hit me really hard, and I found it difficult to write long-form for a while afterward. Instead, I focused on short work, flash and poetry. So this book provided the opportunity to immerse myself in that form, which became increasingly important to me at a time when I was feeling cut loose and uprooted. It provided consolation or a form of solace. Finishing the anthology coincided with the lifting of grief after about a year and a half, and the first substantial piece of prose I wrote in that period was the introduction of this book. In the end, the book reconnected me to my own writing.
American Flash Fiction
LOA: In the introduction you use the word “elasticity” to describe flash’s ability to encompass many genres and approaches to writing. Meanwhile the brevity of these stories only enhances their power.
DLU: There’s common perception that because we live in such a high-speed culture, the appeal of flash is that you can read it quickly and it doesn’t take much of your attention. But the opposite is true: because these pieces are short, there’s no room for you to lose attention. The reader has to be as present as the writer.
If you imagine the precision required to get a story across in a few hundred words, the writer has to pay such close attention to language. When I write flash, one of the appeals of it is only having a little space; there’s no room for anything other than what is necessary. That quality of attention translates to the reader. Yes, you can read a piece of flash fiction in two minutes, but it’s not two minutes when your mind can wander.
Ernest Hemingway (Public Domain) and Lydia Davis (CC BY 2.0)
The idea that we have to be in the moment is, paradoxically, one of the most overlooked aspects of flash fiction. But some of the most powerful work in the anthology is also the shortest. There’s the Lydia Davis story “Happiest Moment,” which is essentially about people finding joy through other people’s joy. One of the first stories that came to mind when we started putting this book together was Ernest Hemingway’s “Cat in the Rain.” It’s a little longer, about 1,100 words, and takes place over an hour during the honeymoon of a young couple. We spend perhaps seven minutes of our own time in their company, and we know, just from what’s between the lines, that their marriage is doomed.
In another kind of blurring, some of my favorite work here was not originally published as fiction. The Raymond Carver piece “Lemonade” was originally published as a poem, and was conceived as a conscious hybrid. Another example is Carolyn Forché’s “The Colonel,” which is widely known as a prose poem. But it works as flash, and recasting it that way allows the reader to conceptualize the piece through a different genre lens.
Because flash defies expectations about what a story can do, it can also lower barriers and let people to participate as readers and writers.
LOA: There is another line from your introduction, about flash fiction being about ambiguity. It’s even in the name “flash,” the coincidence of brevity—something you can read in a flash—and work that flashes in your mind or has this epiphanic quality. What is the connection between flash’s ambiguity and its intense compression?
DLU: I say this when I teach nonfiction: everything is fiction. Life occurs as it occurs. If you’re philosophically situated where I am, in the absurdist-existentialist camp, the universe is chaotic and has no inherent meaning that humans can wrap their minds around. But we are telling stories about what happens in that universe, and those stories need some kind of shape. Simply building a narrative frame around a set of events is in fact a fictionalizing impulse. We’re imposing structure onto the chaos of our experience whenever we write about it.
Flash acknowledges this as part of its very essence, because it can only be a moment. It isn’t going to encompass an entire life, and sometimes the moment the work presents is contradictory or perverse.
Raymond Carver (Wikimedia Commons), Kate Chopin (Public Domain), and Carolyn Forché (CC BY-SA 4.0)
For instance, Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” is about an unhappy wife whose husband dies, and she dies immediately afterward, but not of the broken heart everyone thinks. It is an instant, and in that instant is encapsulated this character’s life and the life of the marriage. We can’t go back and see the tragedy of the marriage, because there’s no space. We only get hints. The writing itself is not ambiguous. Chopin is extremely good at creating the narrative, the characters, the setting. But the emotional territory at the center of the story is so complicated.
LOA: Because it’s organized chronologically, the anthology is also a kind of history of American flash fiction, and maybe of American writing more broadly.
DLU: I was trying to trace the progression, or the arc, of this kind of writing through American literature. Looking through the contents, it’s fascinating how many of the writers here are known for their longer work, novels or reporting, but are also operating in this shorter territory. It reminds us that writers are doing everything all the time. Most writers I know work by instinct and sometimes that means moving across genres, writing a poem and then an essay. But there are writers like Diane Williams or Lydia Davis or Venita Blackburn who are operating in flash fiction as a primary directive.
In the early days, a lot of shorter fiction appeared in magazines or periodicals as curios, and then it became something else in the 1920s and ’30s—more experimental and modernist. In the ’40s and ’50s, we get into genre fiction, with Dashiell Hammett and David Goodis. There’s a Damon Knight story, one of my favorites, about God coming back on the day of reckoning and there’s nobody there to greet him. As we get into the ’60s and beyond, we start moving into writers who are working, if not exclusively, then largely in short-form. Lydia Davis has certainly written longer short stories and essays, translated, written novels. But when I think of her work, the first thing that comes to mind are those dozens of really compressed short stories.
Venita Blackburn (photo: Virginia Barnes) and Dashiell Hammett (Public Domain)
LOA: It’s easy to get swept up in the rhythm of reading these stories one after another. There’s a satisfaction that comes with completing a piece of writing, even if it’s very short, so you get that reward frequently while reading this anthology, no matter where you dip in.
DLU: I like having an internal narrative for any project I’m editing, for that ideal reader who’s going to read the whole book cover to cover. At the same time, because I almost never read anthologies that way in practice, I fully encourage you to read this one however you want! You can start on page one and move to the end. You can dip in and out. If I were a reader picking up a copy, the first thing I’d do would be to scan the table of contents and see if there were favorite stories or writers of mine. But the beauty and the ambiguity of the multi-author anthology is that there are as many ways in as there are readers.
LOA: Can you talk about the decision to include contemporary authors in the anthology? How did you balance assessing their work with the likes of Mark Twain and O. Henry?
DLU: One of the many pleasures of this book was the opportunity to open up the canon. The intention was to create a space to recognize flash fiction as part of that tradition and to remove artificial hierarchies. It’s easy to underplay or dismiss short work: How hard could it be to write a story in a paragraph? It must be much harder to write a six-hundred-page novel, right? But the opposite may be true.
I think we are living in a golden age of literature right now. I am seeing so many books of profound interest and stylistic innovation. I’m more excited about reading now than I have been since I was a teenager. The canon has cracked open. There’s room for more voices, more experiences, more stories. There’s still a lot we need to do, but it’s amazing how much exciting work is out and available, and it was important for this anthology to reflect that.
Watch Lucia Berlin Read “My Jockey” in 1984
LOA: Is there something inherently American about the flash form?
DLU: What I think is particularly American about this anthology, and perhaps flash fiction as a whole, is a kind of lowercase-D democratic impulse, which I think may be true of American literature in general. We have hierarchies and a canon, but we’re always pushing against those hierarchies as a culture, looking to expand and blur genre lines. That’s where the American sensibility comes in, the sense that it doesn’t have to be this or that, it can be Kafka and Borges and Dashiell Hammett.
There’s a line by Raymond Chandler from an essay he wrote in the ’40s called “The Simple Art of Murder”: “There are no forms of art. There is only art and precious little of it.” I think about that all the time, whether I’m writing, reading, or teaching. It has absolutely nothing to do with external boxes or hierarchies, just what’s happening on the page. And likewise, we selected the pieces for this anthology not because they fit any category or quota. We just said, “Wow, that piece blew me away.”
That openness, that cracking of the canon, is what makes this selection essentially American.
Original publication of Ben Hecht’s story “The Ax” (Fair Use)
LOA: What has been your experience teaching flash fiction to younger people?
DLU: One of the challenges of teaching is finding work that is both challenging and accessible to students. Certainly the length of flash is helpful in that regard. But it’s also helpful in providing models. For a student who doesn’t feel they can write something longer than a few pages, you can say, “You don’t have to write an extended narrative, just write this.” And because flash defies expectations about what a story can do, it can also lower barriers and let people to participate as readers and writers.
In the early days of the pandemic, I was talking to a friend who’s a writer and a parent about having trouble concentrating, and she said to me, “If I have five minutes, I write for five minutes. If I have ten minutes, I write for ten minutes. Right now, that’s what I’ve got.” I felt the scales fall from my eyes. I was always the writer who needed thirty minutes just to get acclimated. If I didn’t have more than two hours, there was no point in even sitting down.
Hers was really useful advice, and I feel there’s a correlation with flash. If you have five minutes to read, here’s something you can read in five minutes. It lowers the requirement—not the intellectual or aesthetic requirement, to be sure, but the time requirement. With a work of flash, there’s the sense that you’ve had a fully developed and articulated creative experience in a very short period, and then you can either put the book down or you can turn the page. Maybe especially in this culture, where it can seem like there is no beginning and no end sometimes, it can be a powerful experience to have that clearly articulated arc, even if it takes place in the span of a minute of reading.
In my research for this book, one idea I found is that flash begins with fables. Aesop may be the form’s progenitor, because most of his fables are two, three, four hundred words long. I never would have thought of it that way, but I love the idea of this longstanding human impulse to tell a story quickly.
Woodcut of Aesop from 1489 (Public Domain) and Lucia Berlin (Literary Estate of Lucia Berlin)
David L. Ulin is a professor of English at the University of Southern California, where he edits the journal Air/Light. He is the former book editor and book critic of the Los Angeles Times. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, he is the author or editor of more than twenty books, including Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, The Lost Art of Reading: Books and Resistance in a Troubled Time, and most recently the novel Thirteen Question Method. For Library of America, he has edited Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology and The Joan Didion Collection.
