Long Story Short: Flash Fiction by Sixty-five of North Carolina's Finest Writers - Softcover

Gingher, Marianne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 080785977X ISBN 13: 9780807859773

Publisher: University North Carolina Pr, 2009

Synopsis

This book includes luminous stories, each told in a flash. This extraordinary collection gathers short-short stories - none longer than 1,800 words - by some of North Carolina's best contemporary writers, including Russell Banks, Doris Betts, Orson Scott Card, Fred Chappell, Sarah Dessen, Haven Kimmel, Robert Morgan, Lee Smith, Elizabeth Spencer, and Daniel Wallace. The stories are compulsively readable. The spellbinding elements of brevity, variety, and surprise conspire to keep readers flipping pages. Comic, tragic, magical, fantastical, provocative, disturbing, luminous, the short-short form proves a reliably elastic and dazzling medium for every writer featured. In one flash of literary artistry after another, these sixty-five established and emerging writers remind us why we read fiction: to laugh, to learn, to feel, to be discomfited and challenged, to be transported, and to make enlightening and enduring connections with the world outside our own skins. ""Long Story Short"" will appeal to legions of fans who already delight in reading many of the North Carolina authors included here and will introduce them to extraordinary writers they have not yet discovered.

About this title

Review:

[Gingher is] a teacher and a writer who passes the torch.--Durham Herald-Sun

The beauty of this collection is that even the longest short short can be read in 10 minutes. . . . A superb collection. Try writing a short short, and when you despair, just pick up and admire 'Long Story Short.'--Fayetteville Observer

A concise, comprehensive, and compulsively readable collection of short-short stories. . . . Timely."--Art & Literature: the Literary Blog of Metro Magazine

Never mind that no piece extends beyond 1,800 words--these chiseled diminutives somehow scale up, and the reader feels satisfied.--Our State

They are addictive, these little stories. Finish one, and you want to dive into the next.--Charlotte Observer

Extraordinary voices. . . . The best of these stories delight, shock and mystify but often require a retracing of steps, a closer look--with each rereading deepening our understanding.--Atlanta Journal-Constitution

An Oxford American Editors' Pick

About the Author:

Marianne Gingher is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her most recent book is <i>Adventures in Pen Land</i>.

About this edition

• Publisher: University North Carolina Pr
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 080785977X
• ISBN 13: 9780807859773
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 218