Stronger Faster Shorter: Flash Fictions - Softcover

David Swann

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0993182208 ISBN 13: 9780993182204

Publisher: Flash: The International Short-Short Story Press, 2015

Synopsis

Stronger Faster Shorter: Flash Fictions is the inaugural chapbook of Flash: The International Short-Short Story Press. Imagine you have returned from a war to find the soldiers you killed wandering the streets of your home town and sleeping with all the girls you fancy. The poor old pigeons are not having it much easier. They have flown back from overseas to discover their coop bolted shut. Word is, the champion fancier has gone down with an allergy to his flock. Word is, the birds homing has brought them somewhere strange. In this collection of twenty-five short-short stories, the characters are searching for the things we all crave: a place to be, a use for their time, and that special creature who will share the hours with them... But love is hard to find when there is so much fighting. Ask the Iranian with the Frank Sinatra fixation who you have just dug up from a flowerbed. Or the fundraisers knocking each other s lights out at the Annual Party for the Association of Parents of Children with Hand and Arm Deficiencies. They are in the wars, for sure. But these people go on dreaming of peace. Take the lonely fruit-picker, living in a caravan far from home. If she opens her hand now, a man will drop a flower from the sky and it will fall into her grasp... Then he will fire hot air into his balloon and rise again. And he will look down and agree that it is strange to see your home town like this, that distance makes him fond of its wrecked old streets. But whenever he lands, he looks at the sky again. And he loves the fruit-picker most when he cannot quite reach her.

About this title

About the Author

David Swann was born four doors up the street from the novelist Jeanette Winterson, who scared him stiff with spooky stories. Later, he was given the even more frightening task of reporting on Accrington Stanley football matches for the local newspaper. After a three-year stint as a journalist in the Netherlands, he returned to England to take an MA in Creative Writing at Lancaster University, which he passed with Distinction. From 1996 to 1997, he was Writer in Residence at H.M.P. Nottingham Prison. A book based on his experiences in the jail, The Privilege of Rain (Waterloo Press, 2010), was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. He is currently Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Chichester, where he teaches modules on fiction, poetry, and screenwriting. Swann s short stories and poems have been widely published and won many awards, including six successes at the Bridport Prize and two in the National Poetry Competition. His debut short-story collection, The Last Days of Johnny North, was published by Elastic Press in 2006. In 2013, Swann served as judge for the Bridport Prize international flash-fiction competition.

Edition details

• Publisher: Flash: The International Short-Short Story Press
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0993182208
• ISBN 13: 9780993182204
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 53
• Editor: Ashley Chantler