Multiple authors (anthology) 129 pages air & nothingness press (2024)

Read this if you like: formal experimentation, flash fiction

tl;dr summary: Collection of 18 flash stories across genres that make use of footnotes and other marginalia to tell narratives in a new way.

See the book on the air and nothingness press website

Writing flash fiction in any genre is hard for me. I love a well-built world, a complex plot, a big cast of characters—all things that are tricky to fit into any short story length, much less in 1,000 words or less.

This is also what I’ve come to love about writing flash fiction, though. It’s a valuable exercise in focus and economy of language. Any flash story is condensed in some way, but that’s especially true for fantasy, sci-fi, or historical—any genre where you need to establish a world the reader doesn’t know yet. It takes a deft hand to immerse someone in a new reality, introduce them to a character they care about, and give them an actual plot to follow, without letting the story sprawl beyond a flash piece’s limited real estate.

Jennifer Wortman 167 pages Split/Lip Press (2019) 

Read this if you like: Susan Minot, Kristen Roupenian, writing flash fiction

Tl;dr summary: Stories of people trying to find and show love and mostly failing, but in a funny, beautifully-written way.

See the book on Bookshop

Chapbook-length manuscripts are admittedly more common for poetry than for fiction, but that certainly doesn’t mean they’re off-limits for prose writers. This length of around 20-40 pages is ideal for collections of micro-fiction and micro-essays, as well as stand alone short stories and essays that aren’t quite big enough to be novellas (if you write things that straddle that length divide, you can check out my list of long short story and novella publishers to find more places to send them).

Since this length and style of book has been considered the domain of poets for so long, though, searching for fiction chapbook publishers can be frustrating. They’re definitely out there—it can just take creative search terms and time spent scouring press guidelines to find them.

Sherrie Flick 207 pages Autumn House Press (2016)

Read this if you like: Writing and reading flash fiction

tl;dr summary: Collection of short (and short-short) literary stories showing the everyday lives of a variety of characters.

See the full summary on Bookshop