The Best Small Fictions 2018 - Softcover

Fiction. Poetry. THE BEST SMALL FICTIONS is the first contemporary anthology solely devoted to honoring the best short hybrid fiction published in a calendar year. The series, which began in 2015, has featured an international group of both seasoned and emerging authors who work in flash, micro fiction, prose poetry, haibun, and other hybrid forms. Tara L. Masih founded this annual series and now serves as consulting editor. For our 2018 edition, we welcomed Sherrie Flick as series editor and Pushcart Prize winning author Aimee Bender as guest editor. This latest edition includes 53 works by writers such as Lydia Davis, Rumaan Alam, Diane Williams, Kathy Fish, Matt Bell, Aleksandar Hemon, Maxim Loskutoff, Michael Parker, Meg Pokrass, Deb Olin Unferth, and Desiree Cooper. Past guest editors have included Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler (2015), PEN/Malamud Award winner and O. Henry Prize winner Stuart Dybek (2016), Rea Award and PEN/Malamud Award winner Amy Hempel (2017).

Aimee Bender is the author of five books--including The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, a NY Times Notable Book of 1998, international bestseller The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, and most recently The Color Master, which was a NY Times Notable Book of 2013. Her work has been published in Granta, GQ, The Paris Review, McSweeney's, Tin House, and more, as well as heard on "This American Life" and "Selected Shorts." She has been translated into sixteen languages. When in graduate school at University of California Irvine, she often turned in two stories because she was so interested in the shorter form (and at that point didn't write much that was longer); this turned out to be invaluable, because it allowed the workshop to point her towards the better work, which was not always obvious. Her first published short short, "The Rememberer," was printed in The Missouri Review, a journal she had tried for years and years. She teaches creative writing at University of Southern California, and lives in Los Angeles with her family.