The hundred writers in this dazzling new collection show that less can indeed be more. American Flash Fiction celebrates the beguiling art of the very short story across a century and a half of American literary history, from Mark Twain and Bret Harte to Rabih Alameddine, Venita Blackburn, and Diane Williams. These flash fictions, as they began to be called in the 1980s, explore the imaginative possibilities of brevity for satire, horror, speculative fiction, crime fiction, protest fiction, metafiction, naturalism, minimalism, postmodernism, and other modes that resist easy categorization. Some read like modern-day parables or fractured fables, or resonate with the revelatory surprise of a koan. Some are lyrical, or recall the unsettling logic of dreams. Many seem to contain worlds or traverse vast imaginative territory, while others quietly frame a moment, a feeling, or a relationship. All are full of “unexpected depths and sustaining energy,” as David L. Ulin writes in his introduction, and will invite readers to return to them again and again with fascination and delight.

David L. Ulin is the books editor of Alta and former book editor of the Los Angeles Times. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, he is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, The Lost Art of Reading: Books and Resistance in a Troubled Time, and most recently the novel Thirteen Question Method. For Library of America, he has edited Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology and The Joan Didion Collection.