Monday, May 24, 2010

Wigleaf has announced its Top 50 very short fictions 2010, selected by Brian Evenson. I'm happy to say my story "The Devil Called Satan Had Me for a Snack" made the list (see the stories in Action, Yes on the sidebar), and even happier to be in the company of such excellent work, both on the Top 50 and the long list. Editor Scott Garson is a great champion of this form, and he's doing a real service to writers and readers in highlighting these fictions and the journals that publish them, as he's been doing for the past few years. His foreword and Evenson's introduction are both worth reading. Garson is right that this is a "boom time" for very short fiction (which Garson's rules for selection define as under 1000 words), largely because of the editors of web journals who support this new-ish genre and the "real openness," as Garson puts it, that the form demands of both writers and readers. As Evenson writes, "The future of short-short fiction seems to me increasingly to be found online."