Lately there are brilliant flashes of fiction almost everywhere you look——in magazines, journals, anthologies, collections, and such pieces are proliferating on the Internet as well. Is flash fiction new? Or is it an old art form enjoying a revival? I would answer that it is something old, something new, something borrowed, and something literarily true. Done well, flash fiction is a wedding of styles, traditions, and genres.

The short-short story form travels under many aliases. Its other names include sudden, postcard, minute, furious, fast, quick, skinny, and micro fiction. *In France, these short-shorts are called nouvelles (using Daniel Boulanger's definition) while the Chinese refer to them as pocket-size, palm-size, and my personal favorite, the smoke-long story (just long enough to read while smoking a single cigarette). For the purposes of this article, the term "flash fiction" will used to embrace the various names and lengths by which the short-short form travels.

Charles Baxter, in the Introduction to Sudden Fiction International, notes that these stories cross many thresholds——"they are between poetry and fiction, the story and the sketch, prophecy and reminiscence, the personal and the crowd." He also adds that "this form is not about to be summarized by any one person's ideas about it." A study of these works shows the great variety they display. But flash fiction, by any other name, and by whatever length or type, would shine as bright.

The common denominator in all of these works is brevity. Though editors, critics, and writers differ on their length, in general, flash fiction runs from as few as 50 words to as many as 2000. Randall Jarrell wrote that a story can be as short as a single sentence. Many memorable flash fiction pieces consist of just one or two (sometimes quite long) sentences. But they are much more than length, word count, or number of sentences.

The term 'flash fiction' can encompass a wide range of genres and forms including traditional, mainstream, realism, magical realism, epistles, mysteries, myths, tall tales, fables, parables, plays, fairy tales, horror, suspense, science fiction, prose poetry, postmodern stories, and the list goes on.

Flash fiction can also embrace highly experimental writing that pushes the boundaries of traditional reader expectations. For instance, some flash fiction stories are told through such seemingly mundane methods as a magazine quiz, a survey questionnaire, acknowledgments to a scholarly biography. Stories can be created from bulletin board messages, classified ads, or telephone answering machine messages. Some challenge convention by relying solely on dialogue or using the rare second person point of view. These small gems often incorporate twists throughout the story or provide a startling development at the end.

The writing in this type of story must be tight and precise, compressed and highly charged. Good stories often speak obliquely and address the human condition in a manner that is often more successful than less subtle approaches. The best flash fiction——like other good literature——lingers in the mind long after the last word has been read.

Some claim that the proliferation of the short-short story is due to modern readers' attenuated attention spans, their shortened sound-byte mentality. Others think it is because of the "asthmatic" conditions under which we live——our fiction reflects the "out-of-breathness" of modern living. Higher printing costs and editorial desire to increase variety may also enter in. And some think it is because so many have lost faith in the traditional way of telling stories at great length. Such readers and writers realize that "truth" comes infrequently and then only in the briefest glimpses.

Whatever the reason, today's flash fiction writers draw from a noble heritage. Aesop (his famous fables), Ovid (in Metamorphoses), Guy de Maupassant, Anton Chekov (who once said "I can speak briefly on long subjects."), O. Henry, and Franz Kafka (especially in his Parables and Paradoxes) are but a few of those who have succeeded in this arena.

Among contemporary writers Jorge Luis Borges stands out. Many consider him to be one of the twentieth century's finest writers. Some of his pieces run half a page or less. Yet these tiny, thought-provoking, and often highly unsettling stories remain in the mind and continue to haunt.

Other fine writers who include very short pieces among their works are Donald Barthelme, Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Brautigan, John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Russell Edson, and Raymond Carver. In fact, there are far too many fine writers of this type of work to even scratch the surface here.

Writers of short-shorts are not only turning out pieces that stand alone and which are published as discrete stories, but some use them to create longer works. Italo Calvino built his novel, Invisible Cities, from stories of one or two pages. Alan Lightman, a physicist-author, wrote Einstein's Dreams the same way. Taking yet another direction, Barry Yourgrau also turns his stories into performance art, reading them in clubs, theaters, and on radio.

The popularity of writing and reading flash fiction is currently a worldwide phenomenon. It is on the rise in the United States and Canada where respected literary journals regularly include it among their offerings. In addition, translations are pouring into English speaking journals from around the world. Latin America, where such work has a long tradition, continues the interest. The form also flourishes in China where it appears in magazines and daily newspapers. Italy is seeing a renewed life for flash fiction and, especially exciting, in Cyprus it comes in just behind poetry as the type of literary writing published most often.

Flash fiction seems particularly well-suited to Internet publications. Apart from the fascinating subject matter, the size of these stories is well-suited to reading on screen. And the world-wideness of the web makes international material more accessible than ever before. The wedding of flash fiction and the Internet seems to have all the ingredients for a happy and prosperous union.

In print, or on the web, the future of this art form seems assured. There will always be a need for good, tightly-written flash fiction piecesdazzling short-shorts that can open out the world. As Keats said of poetry, they can show us "infinite riches in a small room."

Selected List of Works Consulted

• Shaphard, Robert, and James Thomas, eds. Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories. Layton, Utah: Gibbes M. Smith, Inc., 1986.
  
• Shaphard, Robert, and James Thomas, eds. Sudden Fiction International: 60 Short-Short Stories. New York-London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1989.
  
• Allen, Roberta. Fast Fiction: Creating Fiction in Five Minutes. Cincinnati: Story Press, 1997.
  
• Thomas, James, and Denise Thomas, and Tom Hazuka. Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories. New York-London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992.
  
• Eprile, Tony. "Uncovering the 'Uncommon Narrative.'" Fiction Writer July 1999.

Pamelyn Casto is the administrator for the online Flash Fiction Writing Workshop (http://home.att.net/~p.casto) and the editor for the free online newsletter, Flash Fiction Flash: The Newsletter for Flash Literature Writers (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FlashFictionFlash ). Pam also facilitates online flash fiction courses at Coffeehouse For Writers (http://www.coffeehouseforwriters.com/flash.html).