Book Review: Best Microfiction 2021

Nick Fewings

Best Microfiction 2021 edited by Meg Pokrass, Gary Fincke and Amber Sparks, Pelekinesis, 2021

Reviewed by Kate Blackwood

Why to read Best Microfiction 2021 is clear enough: here we have in one volume 102 of the most remarkable small fictions published in the past year, thoughtfully chosen and artfully arranged by guest editor Amber Sparks and series editors Meg Pokrass and Gary Fincke.

And 2021 is a particularly exciting time for microfiction, with several of the journals represented having come into being in the past fifteen years. “I do think very short fiction is still frontier-ish,” Wigleaf editor Scott Garson says in an interview in the volume.

But the frontier is not always comfortable. This collection contains the best of the year in a genre marked by both exquisite concentration and disturbingly lasting effect. The punchline from one of these stories might stay with you for the rest of the day, the month, the year. Or forever. This is not your Netflix queue. Therefore, how to read this best-of collection merits a guide.

1. Read one piece at a time. Multiple times.

Each of these microfictions comprises its own world and deserves — demands — your full attention. Each piece is a game that teaches you how to play as you read.

“A piece that is 250 words has to work even harder than a piece twice the length of the much ‘larger’ flash of 1,000 words,” says Flash Frontier editor Michelle Elvy in an included interview. “It’s not merely a story truncated; there’s a particular focus needed … A micro has to use the space with tremendous economy, which means it must also pay particular attention to style.”

Many selections experiment with form and capitalize on style. “When We Were Young,” by Christopher M. Drew (Trampset), conveys a single, vivid action in one extended sentence that encompasses even the title: “…we’d cut school and crowd the narrow bridge over the railroad…” The resulting intentional disaster echoes through a lifetime, and the 236-word story leaves you with soot in your eyes.

In an even more condensed piece, “Philtrum” by Sudha Balagopal (The Dribble Drabble Review), packs life, love, death, and rebirth into one sentence punctuated by a series of “after” statements that stack time like a deck of cards.

“Three Postcards,” by Kathleen McGookey (Ilanot Review), innovates form in another way (or is it as old as the epistolary novel?) positioning a bit of civilized sight-seeing against a break in sanity: “Dear Mother, today was an overturned rowboat, purposely left on shore.”

A few pieces draw on outside forces. “Should she have ignored him?” starts the micro “Red” by Melissa Ostrom (Matchbook Literary Magazine) in an unnerving Q&A version of a familiar fairy tale. “Should she not have smiled back?” The story of Rapunzel inspires a micro by Faye Brinsmead (perhappened mag). At least two pieces reference Alice in Wonderland and its myths of maximization and miniaturization.

But perhaps the most artful fictions in the collection are those that gather strength from internal tension in an otherwise straight-forward narrative. In “It’s 5 am-ish, and my father tells me a story from his time in Singapore,” by Exodus Oktavia Brownlow (No Contact), a father and daughter in a truck cab and an hour of conversation tell a complete and beautiful story.

2. Read with the reverence with which you approach the ocean at high tide.

Packing this most concentrated force, the fictions come at you one after the other. “There’s no big apocalypse,” contributor Avra Margariti quotes Neil Gaiman in a craft essay at the end of the collection. “Just an endless procession of little ones.”

Some of the little apocalypses are quiet. Silent, actually. “A Desert Graveyard” by Minyoung Lee (Trampset) swirls around a desert shrub, thorny and dried-up, yet “beautiful in a way that makes city people leave their manicured lawns in Beverly Hills for entire weekends.” Moving while unmovable, the shrubs endure — and someone finally comes to see it.

A few pieces build on waves of language, like “Med(i)a” by C.C. Russell (takahe magazine): “A story that humanizes… A story that wonders… A story that makes us feel…” mimicking TV news stories’ effect. And one verb, “trade,” repeats in “Fleas, Markets” by Pete Segall (The Adroit Journal) for an effect that is not so much poetic as musical.

“Foundering” by Matthew J. Richardson (FlashBack Fiction) builds on actual waves, in a narrative of a shipwreck seen from shore. “Zasturgi” by Hibah Shabkhez (Flash Frontier) builds on fantastical waves of snow.

The collection editors have ordered the book in masterful fashion, arranging tangentially related pieces so they build on each other. In the best example, a triple punch of three dynamic stories — “Moon Watching” by Regan Puckett (FlashFlood); “Streets” by Xosman Qado (Epiphany); and “City of Serena” by Dawn Raffel (Big Other) — play off one another thematically three-quarters of the way through, giving the book a finishing wind where many collections lose momentum.

In fact, guest editor Amber Sparks had a storm surge in mind when assembling and arranging the collection: “There seemed at times a hurricane blowing through these pieces,” she writes in the introduction, “a sort of urgency you only find in writers in the midst of pleasure in pushing the envelope.”

3. Read with a pen and paper nearby.

Or laptop and Scrivner. Or pencil and envelope; recording app and voice; or whatever you use to jot down ideas. Because one lasting effect of all these waves is to make you want to jump in yourself.

Even the presence of greatness, implied by the “best of” label, in this case encourages participation and engagement. Microfictions might be challenging for readers, yes, but they are accessible for writers.

We see micro after micro putting a frame around things we see every day, encouraging us to carve out stories for ourselves from familiar raw materials: a roast chicken, a fight with a neighbor, a conversation in a truck cab, a formation of snow. The more we read microfiction, the more the world might speak to us in stories, one page at a time.

And with microfiction still in a frontier era, as Wigleaf editor Scott Garson puts it, there’s no one telling you how to join in or who belongs. “In the case of both the novel and the full-length short story, you have a lot of authorities out there delivering wisdom to would-be practitioners,” he said. “The fact that very short fiction is authority-less, for the most part — that’s good. It’s good.”