The
Best Small Fictions 2015, edited by Robert Olen Butler, series editor Tara L. Masih
Reviewed by Tim Jones
With input from consulting and “roving”
editors around the world including Michelle Elvy, co-editor of New Zealand’s
own “Flash Frontier”, Best
Small Fictions 2015 brings together a selection of the best small fiction (short-short
stories) written in, or translated into, English for the year. There are 55
stories in all, including “Eat Beetroot” by Waikouaiti author Jane Swan, which
was first published in Flash
Frontier.
Stories from 6 to 1000 words could be
submitted to the anthology: to me, 1000 words is approaching the confines of a
‘traditional’ short story, while 6 words makes Twitter’s 140-character limit
look positively Tolstoyan. So there is a wide variety of forms even with the
overall constraint of “small fictions”.
In addition to the literary merits of the
work included, as discussed below, this is an excellent resource for anyone
teaching, or teaching themselves, the writing of short fiction. The
introductions, interviews and features on flash fiction at the end of the
anthology add to its merits as a teaching tool.
The stories included are selected from a
lengthy list of finalists by the editor, who reads the finalists blind, so the
selection inevitably reflect the editor’s personal taste. My own taste in very
short literary fiction runs to the surreal, the bizarre, the metafictional. It’s
fair to say that that’s where my tastes alight in short fiction in general, but
I think the shortest lengths of fiction are especially suited to the type of
conceptual experiments that can quickly pall if sustained over longer works.
Most of the stories in this anthology
follow the more traditional realist short fiction trope of focusing on a still,
small moment – and do it very well. Jane Swan’s “Eat Beetroot” is a concise and
well-executed example of such a story, and there are many others in the
collection, by writers both new to me and others well-known (Bobbie Ann Mason, for
example).
But my personal favourites include “A
Notice from the Office of Reclamation”, by J. Duncan Wiley, in which the
institutional language of an official safety pronouncement battles human
curiosity; the Northern-Ireland-set “The Third Time My Father Tried To Kill
Me”, by James Claffey, with its time-reversed sequence of events; Lisa Marie
Basile’s “Apocryphal”; “Before She Was A Memory” by Emma Bolden, which has an
opening line a scriptwriter would kill for; “The Intended” by Dawn Raffel, a perfect
cocktail of unease, expressed in striking imagery, which was my favourite story
in this anthology; the single two-page-long paragraph of Julia Strayer’s “Let’s
Say”; and Ron Carlson’s “You Must Intercept the Blue Box Before It Gets To the
City”, which cunningly thwarted this reader’s expectations of box-interception.
These are my favourites; but the stories
which hew closer to “traditional” literary realism are also fine examples of
the craft of story-telling, and whatever your preference you are likely to find
much to enjoy – and, if you are a writer, to aspire to.
Despite its international ambitions, the
final selection is still largely US-centric. That could be because the best
small fictions in English are being written in the US; it could be because not
enough small fiction written in other languages is being translated into
English. But it could also reflect the editor’s personal taste, and so I hope
that guest editors of future editions will be from a range of countries,
cultures and writing traditions. And I hope there will be many such future
editions.
