Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, 8.1 (April 2015)

Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine is a biannual literary periodical, published as an A5 book. Since the inaugural issue of October 2008, Flash has established itself as the world’s leading publisher of quality short-short stories and serious reviews of flash-fiction anthologies, collections, guidebooks, and critical studies. It also publishes occasional essays on flash fiction. The journal Geist has described Flash as ‘one of the best current venues’ for ‘high-quality’ flashes and the scholar Dr Michael A. Chaney (Dartmouth College, New Hampshire) rates it as one of the top ten literary magazines to send short-short stories.Journal edited by Peter Blair and Ashley Chantler. This journal is not available through ChesterRep.The fourteenth issue of Flash, which features new stories from Botswana, Britain, Egypt, France, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Ireland, Japan, South Africa, Sweden, and the USA. We are pleased to open with four pieces by David Swann, whose Stronger Faster Shorter: Flash Fictions launched our new venture, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Press. For more information about the collection and the Press, please visit Flash’s website. This issue also includes the 2015 winner of the UK’s National Flash Fiction Youth Competition, ‘Hide and Seek’ by Helen Gurr, a talented A-level student at Wirral Grammar School for Girls. The competition was organized by Flash and the Department of English, University of Chester; it was judged by the editors and leading flash author Vanessa Gebbie. ‘Flash Presents’ contains four pieces – ‘The Interview’, ‘The Goat Tetherer Attempts to Make History’, ‘The Shortage at the Petting Zoo’, and ‘Storage’ – from Nick Parker’s acclaimed debut collection The Exploding Boy and Other Tiny Tales (2011). In the ‘Flash Essay’ section, Charlotte Rich connects ‘Kate Chopin’s Very Short Stories’ to the late-nineteenth-century American author’s longer work. Alongside the essay, ‘A Very Fine Fiddle’ is reprinted; in Flash, 7.1, you can read ‘A Harbinger’, ‘Doctor Chevalier’s Lie’, ‘Old Aunt Peggy’, and ‘Ripe Figs’. ‘Flash Reviews’ assesses a rich diversity of texts: three chapbooks (Nuala Ní Chonchúir’s Of Dublin and Other Fictions, William Todd Seabrook’s The Imagination of Lewis Carroll, and Shellie Zacharia’s Not Everything Lovely and Strange Is a Dream); three longer collections (Stuart Dybek’s Ecstatic Cahoots, James Robertson’s 365, and Avital Gad-Cykman’s Life In, Life Out); and a compendium of five novellas-in-flash with accompanying craft essays (My Very End of the Universe, by Tiff Holland, Meg Pokrass, Aaron Teel, Margaret Patton Chapman, and Chris Bower). Copies of the magazine are available through the magazine’s website: http://www.chester.ac.uk/flash.magazin