Tania Hershman

Meg Pokrass

Gary Fincke

The Best Microfiction anthology series provides recognition for outstanding literary stories of 400 words or fewer. Co-edited by award-winning microfiction writer/editor Meg Pokrass, and Flannery O'Connor Prize-winning author Gary Fincke, the anthology features Tania Hershman serving as final judge,

Best Microfiction 2022

Michael Murphy

Daniel Wolff

John Kinsella

Alex Stein

Judith Hermann

Yoram Kaniuk

Steven Heighton

Benjamin Paloff

Christopher Sorrentino

Ruth Curry

Marion Wyce

Jesse Goolsby

Renee Ashley

Cassie Hay

Joyce Hinnefeld

Sean McConnell

Geoffrey Nutter

Michael Copperman

Krzysztof Jaworski

Caleb Curtiss

Anthony Berris

Madeleine Beckman

Wendy Burk

Michela Costello

Margot Dembo

Suzanna Hopcroft

Tedi Mills

Anne McPeak

Drew Riley

Ryan Romine

Peter Shippy

William Zander

The Rogue Idea

In The Infinity Room the reader will find polished, precise poems that are built around the author’s experiences of touring Nevada’s atomic bomb test sites, the Chernobyl disaster site, and Oak Ridge, as well as living for decades near Three Mile Island. These iconic landmarks of the threat of nuclear technology become more than talking points as they provide grounding for narratives of faith and skepticism from multiple viewpoints that employ science, religion, history, myth, politics, and popular culture, including a piece about the author’s experience as a student at Kent State at the time of the National Guard shooting. The poems here are tightly controlled but electric, dark yet vibrant with love and longing, and packed with memorable characters and places that are presented through a singular, lyrical voice that connects us to what it means to be human.

The Infinity Room

Stories featuring suburban families in Pennsylvania. In Marfa Lights, a woman becomes allergic to electricity, Darwin in the City is on a man going blind, and Siding deals with a father's confusion on discovering his son is a transvestite.

Stories

Emergency Calls

Amber Sparks

Fiction. Short Stories. Edited by Meg Pokrass and Gary Fincke with guest editor Amber Sparks. THE BEST MICROFICTION anthology series provides recognition for outstanding literary stories of 400 words or fewer. Co-edited by award-winning microfiction writer/editor Meg Pokrass; and Flannery O'Connor Prize-winning author Gary Fincke; the anthology features Amber Sparks serving as final judge; and one hundred and five of the world's best very short short stories.

Best Microfiction 2021

Vanishings is a stunning collection of autobiographical narratives that propel us into the life and mind of a literary genius. "Yams were in stories about Africa that I read in Sunday school. Tribes ate them, villagers who still carried spears and stared at missionaries who visited them to explain Jesus. I was out of college before I willingly ate a yam, filling a groove I cut in its skin with butter and brown sugar a minute before I took it from the oven. A few years later, when I had children of my own who complained about yams, wishing for French fries or mashed potatoes with gravy, the milk carton that sat on the table during dinner always featured the face of a missing child. “Have You Seen Me?” its caption read, and those faces reminded me to be thankful even as my children yammered their petty complaints. As the three of them poked at their half-eaten yams, wasting what was left after a half hour of whining, those milk carton faces kept my anger in check." —from the book

Vanishings

The Fire Landscape is a series of poem sequences that chronicle a wide variety of coming-of-age moments from childhood in the 1950s through the beginning of the 21st century. These deeply layered, complex narrative poems are connected by close personal observation of place and time but also by the politics of the Cold War and its aftermath, including a sequence driven by the May 4, 1970, shooting of students by the National Guard at Kent State where Gary Fincke was a student at the time.

Poems

The Fire Landscape

A university maintenance worker and his wife decide to give birth to their anencephalic baby and to accept all the consequences that will follow. During summer vacation, a journalism student trysts with his girlfriend at her suspicious father's house and soon witnesses the ultimate in paternal vengeance. A schoolboy faces peer violence while his mother struggles with cancer, each relying upon a hopelessly misplaced faith. In The Stone Child, Gary Fincke presents characters at turning points, where the effects of their decisions will ripple throughout the rest of their lives.“Clean Shaven” depicts the last family vacation of a couple with two nearly grown children; in a few pivotal days, Reynolds, the father, struggles with, accepts, then embraces, his comradeship with his roguish, college-expelled son. In “Natural Borders,” the way a small-town sheriff handles the marital problems of a pair of eccentrics leads to a conflagration that will haunt him forever.The eleven stories in The Stone Child are about families of varying kinds, what binds them, and what threatens to tear them apart. Under pressure, the characters strive to maintain whatever connections they have established with one another. In important ways, all of these stories, even those with exclusively adult characters, are coming-of-age tales, the characters arriving at those points in their lives when what they do and say will mark significant passages. Fincke brings great humanity to his characters and displays a sharp and wry sense of humor; his sense of place is strong, his stories richly textured, and his prose a joy to read. Primarily meditating on the viewpoints of male characters, Fincke gives us stories with beginnings that pull us right in and endings that won't let us leave the world of the story until long after we have finished reading.

The Stone Child

Dan Chaon

Best Microfiction is an annual showcase for the world's best very short stories.

Best Microfiction 2019

The Double Negatives of the Living

Standing Around the Heart (p)

Michael Martone

Fiction. The Best Microfiction anthology series provides recognition for outstanding literary stories of 400 words or fewer. Co-edited by award-winning microfiction writer/editor Meg Pokrass, and Flannery O'Connor Prize-winning author Gary Fincke, and acclaimed author/editor Michael Martone serving as final judge.

Best Microfiction 2020

Gary Fincke

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