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

The call for Moving Across the Landscape in Search of an Idea set the following requirements for writers:

• A long title
• Copious footnotes (at least 250 words)
• A total length of no more than 1,500 words.

…the end result is one of the most unique and entertaining short story anthologies I've read in recent memory. Now, I'm a sucker for a weird form. If a story uses footnotes, or claims to be a found manuscript, or is told in the format of an annotated technical manual—I'm already 90% to loving it before I read a word. Basically, I'm the exact target audience for this anthology, and it's no surprise that I found it absolutely delightful from cover to cover.

The main thing I love about devices like footnotes is that they give readers multiple ways to enter the story. I found myself lingering over the stories longer than I typically would with an anthology, reading once with the footnotes and once without them, or cycling back to the title after I'd read the whole work. All the different ways to experience each story make them so fun to read.

Despite my bias, though, I do think this would also be a great “gateway collection” for the formal-experimentation-curious. In part because the stories are so short—if you're not digging on one story, you can just move on to the next. And they all take their own unique approach to the use of footnotes and other marginalia, along with spanning a whole gamut of genres and styles, so the odds are high that at least one of them will catch your attention.

In a whole collection sense, one strength these stories all share is that their experiment with form feels fully necessary for the story the way it's being told. It isn't just a gimmick. The footnotes introduce a new voice, or the comments add context necessary to get the right meaning from the main narrative. They're all impeccably crafted when it comes to their internal story logic, and the “why” behind the story's form is woven into that logic.

I also think this collection has a lesson to teach writers about titles. The titles of these stories do a lot of work to set the context for the reader, putting them in a time and place, or giving key details about the character. Granted, you're usually not going to want to use a title that takes up a whole page—but the ways these pieces use the titles can be shrunk down to a smaller scale. By front-loading information in the title, the stories jump right in without needing to explain how the world works, or where the character is, or some other important thing that would otherwise probably need a good amount of exposition.

While there are too many stories in this collection to go into full depth on all of them, I did want to highlight some of my favorites:

• “In Which Grace Agatha Zimmerman...” – A delightful story about a little girl with a monster under her bed that balances a light tone with ominous undercurrents in a highly entertaining way.
• “Before I Died...” – Ghost story from the POV of the ghost, layered over a Carver-style family story. The way the footnotes were used here to differentiate voices was one that stood out to me, an intriguing way to employ the device especially when paired with the title.
• “The Cool Side of the Pillow...” – This one might make the best use of the title out of all of them, constructing the protagonist's entire life and mental place before we open on him floating in space, the first test subject of a time travel experiment, with no clue if he’s going to get rescued or die there. The story itself is a beautifully bleak contemplation of regret.
• “Catalogue #1334 of the Time Travel Museum Collection...” – Speaking of beautifully bleak, this one tells the story of a man who's so desperate to fix his relationship with his daughter he breaks the rules of his time travel device. Craft-wise, this one made beautiful use of form for worldbuilding. The core “narrative” is the manual for the time travel device, with annotations from the doomed user. This lets it literally spell out the rules of the device and use that as a point of narrative tension. A similar thing is done in one of my other favorites...
• “The Custodian's Manual for Working Aboard the Generation Ship Unageing Intellect...” – This one takes the annotation idea a step further with nested annotations from various generations of custodians. These are what tell the narrative, which unfolds around a central idea rather than flowing in the way we'd typically think of narrative time.
• “Would anyone care to explain...” – A bad review annotated by the employees trying to explain what really happened, all set in a magic restaurant that has a cauldron with life-restoring powers. Very fun play with voice and excellent use of the form to delay the reveal of information until just the right moment.
• “This Is The Title The Artist…” – Written as the exhibit label for a work of art with a ridiculously long title displayed in a museum, this one doesn’t have a narrative in a traditional sense but it sure takes readers on a journey.

My expectations for air & nothingness books are high. The things I've read from them in the past set quite a lofty standard, from both a writing quality and a design standpoint. Even given that, this anthology blew me away. I kept finding myself stopping to read the stories again while I was going through the book to write this review because some of them are like flash fiction Pringles that I just can't stop reading once I start. For craft study, I'd definitely recommend this one to any writers who like to play with form, even if you typically don't take it as far as some of these authors do. And strictly from an enjoyment standpoint, I'd recommend it to anyone who likes reading new ways to tell stories.

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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.

As I’ve been working on whittling my natural storytelling inclinations down into a more compact form, I’ve come across a few tips that I’ve found very helpful. So I figured I’d pass those along to other writers out there who are seeking tips on how to write better speculative flash. 

Tip 1: Tighten the scope before you start writing.

I’m usually a pantser. I like to wander alongside my characters on rough drafts, following their steps and letting that tell me the best plot movement for the story. The problem is, that kind of exploratory wandering takes a lot of words. The more steps there are in the story’s plot, the harder it’s going to be to tell it effectively in a flash length.

This isn’t to say I go full outline when I write flash. But I do usually take a second before I start writing to sketch out at least the big-picture steps and make sure I’m not biting off more than I can reasonably chew within the word count limits. I’ll focus especially on things like:

• How much in-story time does this plot cover? It’s definitely possible to cover a long timespan in a flash length. That said, the broader the time scope, the more you’ll need to zoom out to fit it all in. That means less time in-scene at the key points along that timeline. As a rule, the shorter the in-story time, the easier it will be to fit into a flash piece.
• What is the story’s driving conflict and what scenes are necessary to show it? I tend to aim for the fewest scenes possible, and favor flash pieces that have a single scene when I can manage it. Again, this is just about making the most of limited resources. The fewer scenes you have, the more words you can devote to each of them.
• Who is the main character and what is their driving motivation? Building three-dimensional, relatable characters takes space. Giving them a single clear objective or problem can help to quickly define their identity and focus the story at the same time, both very helpful in a short length.
• What parts of the world does the reader absolutely need to see? Whatever your story’s setting, there won’t be time to show the reader all of it. Instead, you need to pick only the specific locations, technology, history, culture, rules, and so on that are directly related to the story you’re telling.

Tip 2: Be exacting in your details.

Focusing on specific, unique details is a great way to enhance the realism of a story at any length, but I’d argue the shorter the story, the more important it is. A well-worded description sneaks in worldbuilding that would take a lot of words to explain otherwise. Describing a place as “the long-abandoned, carbon-scarred outpost” implies a lot of history and puts the location in a broader context while it sets a scene.

I try to make every descriptive passage do this kind of double-duty when I’m writing speculative flash. I also try to bring as many of the senses into play as possible to take that reader immersion to the next level. Smell and touch details can be especially useful for bringing a setting to life in a small space.

It’s not just about the details included, either, but also the language used to describe them. Voice can be another powerful tool for packing the maximum meaning into the fewest possible words. It’s kind of a backdoor form of worldbuilding—by replicating the worldview of a character on the page, you plop the reader right down into their reality. This gives the reader insights into how this world works so you don’t have to spell it out for them in narrative. 

Tip 3: Make full use of your title.

I’m terrible at titles as a rule, which isn’t so much of an issue when you’re working on long things like novels—there’s a solid chance, if it gets published, someone else is going to write a new title for it, anyway. Even for full-length stories, I feel like titles aren’t hugely important. They can help to set the context for what’s coming and put the reader in the right mindset, but even a bad title tends to have a more neutral effect; it’s more forgettable than a drain on the reading experience.

Working in flash lengths has forced me to up my title game. When you use it right, the title can do a lot of heavy lifting to set the story up, letting you jump right in to the action from word one.

There are a lot of different ways you can do this. Sometimes it can be useful to use a longer, explanatory title—something like “The Day After the Sasquatch Army Conquered Portland” gives the reader a whole shit ton of world details before the story even officially starts.

You can accomplish the same thing with a shorter title, too. If you call your story something like “The Changeling” or “The Selkie”, the reader will assume this describes one of the characters, and you’ll only need to drop in a few words to flag which one rather than explaining the whole conceit.

Writing flash is a challenge for me, but I’ve found it’s worth the effort. Keeping speculative stories under 1,000 words forces me to think about worldbuilding, plotting, and language in a different way, and I’ve found that practice has improved my writing overall.

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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

I had the privilege of being introduced to this book by hearing the author read aloud—“The Men I Love” and the first few pages of “Love You. Bye.”, which was ultimately what convinced me I needed to buy the book. The setup of the collection’s opening story introduces a recently-depressed-but-doing-better narrator and her psychic friend who sees light cords connecting people to the things and people they love, told with the exact level of quirkiness I prefer in my literary fiction.

While these opening stories are what made me want to buy the book, though, now that I’ve read the whole collection, they’re well down my list of favorites. This collection has a driving momentum that pulls the reader from story to story like they’re Pringles, and I found myself reading more of the stories than I’d intended to each time I sat down with it. 

The thematic linking of the stories is I think what impressed me most about this collection in a whole-book sense. The stories all feel like they belong together and inhabit the same general territory but without becoming repetitive or stale. Wortman was smart in how she interspersed short-shorts between longer stories, employing a variety of forms and POVs to keep the voice fresh with each piece. All of the protagonists exist somewhere on the “hot mess” spectrum, but each in their own unique way. 

Which, ultimately, leads to what impressed me the most about this collection on an individual story level: Wortman’s ability to create three-dimensional, realistic characters in very minimal space. Many of the narrators featured in these stories are simultaneously sympathetic and unlikeable, and that contradiction adds the complexity that makes them feel like real people. The narrator in “I’m Dying without You, Tom” is maybe the best example of this. The narrator, Shelly, is an awkward college student struggling through her first year, and I related to her desperate, flailing efforts toward human connection even while I cringed at the self-defeating ways she went about it. Wortman builds this level of complexity even into the characters of the short-short works, like the two-page knockout “The Speech” that is, by a slim margin, my favorite work in the collection (and as close to a perfect piece of flash fiction as I think I’ve ever read). 

If I have one critique, it’s that the stories where Wortman plays the most with traditional narrative are, to my tastes, the weakest works. I thought “How to Get Over Someone You Love in Ten Easy Steps” was amusing, but was the only piece in the collection that I don’t think is successful in crafting a narrative. Similarly, I very much wanted to love “Which Truth, Patricia?” and I find the idea of the overlapping narratives intriguing, but that was the only story where I found myself lapsing into workshopping brain rather than full reading immersion. On the other hand, it’s also the one that made me feel the most creatively inspired—I finished that story, not still thinking about the characters, but with new story ideas bouncing around my head, and any work that leaves readers with that kind of feeling is doing something right.

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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.

I’ve recently done some of that work in search of places to send a fiction chapbook I’ve been working on, so I figured I’d pass along what I found to maybe save some other writers a bit of time. As with any list like this it’s certainly not comprehensive, but hopefully it at least gives you some ideas of places you can send your manuscript.

At Bay Press

(via the From the Heart series) Duotrope Listing

This Canadian-based literary publisher particularly enjoys work that straddles genre, like literary mysteries and noir, literary-tinged sci-fi and fantasy work, or graphic novels. Along with typical perfect-bound books, they release a limited number of handmade titles every year. Their “From the Heart” series looks for stand-alone short fiction at a chapbook length.

Black Lawrence Press

(via the Black River Chapbook competition) Duotrope Listing | ChillSubs Listing What they publish: Perfect-bound literary chapbooks of 16-36 pages.

The Black River Chapbook contest runs twice a year (April 1-May 31 and September 1-October 31) and is open to both poetry and prose manuscripts. Each contest’s winner gets $500 along with publication and 10 copies, which as you can imagine does make it a very competitive contest. It’s also not cheap, at $17 for an entry. On the plus side, Black Lawrence books are beautiful, and their chapbooks get the same publicity and attention as their full-length titles, so it’s an excellent home for the right manuscript.

BlazeVOX

See their submission guidelines Duotrope Listing What they publish: Hybrid, experimental, and otherwise innovative poetry and prose

BlazeVOX is an independent small press with a focus on works that push the boundaries of form. Content-wise, they tend to stick to realistic, literary fiction, particularly works that explore human relationships and emotions in fresh, new ways.

Bull City Press

During their Chapbook Open Reading Period Duotrope Listing | ChillSubs Listing What they publish: Micro, flash, and hybrid prose chapbooks and tinychaps

Another independent small press, all of Bull City’s titles come from their open reading periods, and they use a pay-what-you-can model for their contests to keep the process accessible for all writers. While their catalog is mostly literary, there are a few more speculative-leaning collections in the mix.

C&R Press

See their submission guidelines ChillSubs Listing What they publish: Collections of fiction, poetry, and CNF, along with hybrid and experimental work

C&R Press aims to publish works that are often overlooked and ignored by commercial publishers. They publish chabooks in two series, their Winter Soup Bowl Series and Summer Tide Pool Series. This one does come with a steeper entry fee ($20 per 20-40 page manuscript) but those selected for publication receive a $100 honorarium along with extensive promotion by the press. It’s also different from other contests in that they’re looking for 1-3 titles for each chapbook call instead of only choosing one winner.

Cutbank

(via the Cutbank Chapbook Contest) Duotrope Listing | ChillSubs Listing What they publish: Single works or collections totaling 25-40 pages

Another one with a steep entry fee ($20) but a high potential payoff. The winner gets $1,000 plus publication, and two runner-ups will also have their manuscript published. The cost to enter is also offset somewhat by the fact that you get a print copy of CutBank Magazine with your entry. As far as content, this is a great market for lyric essays as well as voice-driven fiction.

Eggtooth Editions

(Via their Any Genre Chapbook Contest) Duotrope Listing | ChillSubs Listing What they publish: Manuscripts in any genre of 15-50 pages

The Any Genre Chapbook Contest is open to any writer who hasn’t published a full-length book, making it a great opportunity for emerging writers. It’s also a bit cheaper than the other contests on the list ($10 entry, with a limited number of free submissions available) and the winner gets a $250 prize along with publication and author copies.

The Florida Review

(Via the Leiby Chapbook Contest) Duotrope Listing | ChillSubs Listing What they publish: Prose and graphic narrative manuscripts up to 45 pages

The Florida Reivew is the literary journal of the University of Central Florida, but they also put out a prose or graphic chapbook every year through the contest linked above. Word of warning from personal experience that this one does take a little while to get back to you, but they consider simultaneous submissions so you don’t need to just wait around until they reply.

Interstellar Flight Press

See their submission guidelines Duotrope Listing What they publish: Speculative poetry, novellas, novelettes, and short fiction collections

Interstellar Flight Press is a relatively young indie publisher dedicated to sci-fi, fantasy, and horror. Since it’s a small team, they have limited submission calls, but they rotate genres and formats so if the current one isn’t a fit you can check for future ones.

The Master’s Review

(Via their Chapbook Contest) Duotrope Listing | ChillSubs Listing What they publish: Print and digital versions of prose manuscripts from 25-45 pages

Winners get a pretty sizeable prize for this one—$3,000 and 75 copies of the published chapbook. It’s also only open to writers who don’t have a book-length publication, so it’s another contest that can be a career-launcher for emerging writers. The bad news is its $25 reading fee, high enough you want to really make sure your manuscript fits the press’ vibe before you submit.

New Michigan Press/The Diagram

(Via the Diagram Chapbook Contest) Duotrope Listing | ChillSubs Listing What they publish: Print and PDF chapbooks

New Michigan Press is mostly a chapbook publisher, which sets them apart from a lot of the presses listed here. They take unagented manuscripts primarily through their annual chapbook contest, run by their partner journal DIAGRAM. They don’t only publish work that includes diagrams, but if you do work in hybrid forms with a visual element, this is a great place to send your stuff. The winner gets $1,000 and publication, and finalists are also considered, with 3-6 usually published.

Omnidawn

(via their Fabulist Fiction Chapbook/Novellette contest) Duotrope Listing What they publish: Fabulist fiction, magical realism, and other genres on the borders between speculative and literary

Omnidawn is one of the top publishers out there for speculative chaps. Their published chapbooks range from retold myths to modern twists on fairy tales and urban magical realism. This is another fairly competitive contest with a historically high prize for the winner ($1,000 and 20 author copies in 2025), though also a pretty steep entry fee ($30).

Querencia Press

See their submission guidelines Duotrope Listing | ChillSubs Listing What they publish: Chapbooks and full-length books across genres

This small, independent press accepts work across genres. For realism, they prefer experimental and hybrid manuscripts. They also publish sci-fi, magical realism, surrealism, and horror, and are especially interested in work that centers mental health, chronic illness, and marginalized voices.

Red Hen Press

See their submission guidelines Duotrope Listing What they publish: Literary fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in all lengths

Red Hen Press almost doesn’t count as a small press anymore at this point, but their size can be an advantage for authors. They put out more books a year than most of the presses on this list, and have the resources to offer authors more publicity and support than smaller indie presses. Along with their general list, they have a number of imprints focused on specific demographics and styles, such as Crooked Hearts Press focused on female writers over 55 or their Quill imprint for literary prose from LGBTQ+ writers.

Rose Metal Press

(for their Short Short Chapbook series) ChillSubs Listing What they publish: Flash fiction and hybrid collections

Rose Metal Press is an indie publisher of innovative hybrid poetry and prose. This includes things like novellas-in-flash, novels in verse, and collections that use both text and images—basically anything that isn’t easy to fit into the big-picture genre divisions of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction. Their open reading periods are sporadic, usually only happening every 2-3 years, but their last one was in June 2023 so it’s possible they’ll have one coming up soon.

Split/Lip Press

(via their Fiction Chapbook contest) Duotrope Listing | ChillSubs Listing What they publish: Fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and hybrid work, with a penchant for the boundary-blurring, experimental, and bizarre

Split/Lip Press publishes all of their books through their open reading periods. They work collaboratively with their authors to design and publicize each book, and that supportive community they provide for authors is a big plus. This is another mostly-literary publisher, though it may be a good fit for manuscripts that play on the borders of genre, especially if they also experiment with form and narrative in other ways. Their open prose chapbook reading period is usually April 1-June 1.

Steel Toe Books

(during their chapbook open reading period) ChillSubs Listing What they publish: 1-3 chapbooks a year along with full-length poetry and prose books

Steel Toe Books started as a poetry-only publisher and has recently added fiction and non-fiction to their catalog. While that does make it trickier to scope out what kind of stuff they like from their back titles, it also could be an opportunity for prose writers to have a voice in shaping that aesthetic. All work submitted for contests is considered for publication, not just the winner, so if your work is  a good fit you’re less likely to be rejected just because someone else did things a smidge better.

Tarpaulin Sky Press

See their submission guidelines Duotrope Listing What they publish: Mostly trade paperbacks with some hand-made books, with a focus on hybrid and cross-genre manuscripts

Tarpaulin Sky Press started publishing authors from the Tarpaulin Sky Literary Journal, but they’ve since expanded to accept manuscript submissions. Fair warning their open calls are few and far between, so getting published in their journal is still a smart move to get a foot in the door. Their catalog is mostly realistic fiction with a smattering of genre influence, so while it’s not a market for hard genre it’s one to check out if you write along the edges of realism.

Thirty West Publishing House

See their submission guidelines Duotrope Listing | ChillSubs Listing What they publish: Hand-made chapbooks largely in the literary vein

Thirty West Publishing House puts out books that are artifacts, making them with a mix of familiar and unique materials and giving each a distinctive look to match the words inside. They recently upgraded to a new printer and ended a submission hiatius, which makes it a good time to send along your stuff since there’s no backlog to contend with. Submissions are free and they offer a standard royalty agreement for authors. This is mostly a market for realistic, literary writing, though they’re open to a bit of weird and genre-blurring around the literary periphery.

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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

Flash fiction is a tricky beast. It calls for an author that can do a lot in not much space, an economy of language more similar to poetry than most prose. To be true flash fiction, though—rather than a prose poem or other hybrid form—it also needs to have a narrative progression, along with the well-developed characters and setting expected from longer fiction. Given that, it’s not surprising that there seems to be a lot of debate in the literary community about what is and isn’t true flash fiction, or that so few people do it well.

The 50-odd stories in Whiskey, Etc. are grouped together based on their thematic content. While they feel like they all take place in the same general universe, each tells its own story and concerns its own cast of characters. The stories range in length from a few hundred words to around 15 pages (which, admittedly, is no longer flash, but is still on the short side).

As a writer, my big takeaway from this collection, and why I think the stories work so well in the flash fiction format, is the choice of detail. Character routines become stand-ins for their daily lives, filling in backstory without the need for exposition. The dinner preparation in “Boiled Clear” springs to mind as one example. It opens on Suzy slicing brussels sprouts and chopping garlic, at the same time her boyfriend Neil is dying in a car accident. The implications of this normal life marching on give the death its emotional context.

Common objects also frequently stand in as touchstones for emotions or states of beings, especially food, like the Manhattan Up in “Winter Storm” that represents the life Evelyn didn't live. The car is used the same way to show nostalgic freedom in “Road Trip” and potential freedom in “You Have a Car,” which forms the character’s present by looking at her possible futures.

Another key to the success of these stories is their tight time focus. Few of the stories in this collection span more than a single day; some last only a few minutes. The character's whole life might be revealed in the narration, but the in-story action is often a single event or meal or moment, and this gives the story room to breathe within that moment, lets it stop and show all the small details that build the emotional and narrative tension.

I have to say that while some of the stories in this collection spoke to me more than others, they were all a joy to read. I was trying to read more from a craft perspective, and even so found myself slipping into “reader” mode, getting sucked into the story and having to go back and re-read with more analytical eyes. Whiskey, Etc. turns a microscope on daily life. What it shows is sometimes heartbreaking, often optimistic, and invariably beautifully written.

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