It’s one of the most widely-anthologized short stories for a reason: rhythmic and lyric, a triumph of voice and immediacy. Whatever you think of the actual Taylor Swift, this story is just plain fun. In the end, I just wanted to read this thing again and again.” Which is exactly right. Why? Because all the stories I received were worthy and many were more technically ambitious when it came to language and form, by which I guess I mean experimental. The judge was Steve Almond, who wrote, “I tried quite hard to resist choosing “Taylor Swift” as the winner of this year’s Barthelme Award. I encountered this story-which is about Taylor Swift clones-when it won the Gulf Coast Barthelme Prize a couple of years ago. I’m always impressed by the way Samatar conjures an sustains mood this piece would poke a a wet black hole in any shining day. How does she do it?Įvery sentence here is a story in itself-and then there’s the actual story, of a huntress (or two). I like “The Outing” because it’s the skeleton of a story, poking fun at the notion of “what happens”-and yet still creates a powerful sense of what indeed happened. It’s hard to pick a favorite from Davis’s massive body of work (“ Break it Down” and “The Center of the Story” are two more that I love, though they’re a bit long for this list), but on the flip side, pretty much everything she writes is good. NB: this list should by no means be taken to reflect the “best of all time,” merely “my own personal favorites,” and is only a taste of what’s out there-so do us all a favor and point us to your own beloved micro-fictions in the comments. For that reason, and in honor of Lydia Davis’s birthday, here are eleven very short stories that you must-and can, thanks to the magic of the internet-read at your earliest opportunity.
#Cools short stories to write series
Her work is always where I start when I get into a flash fiction reading jag, but of course, it’s not usually where I finish, else what kind of jag would it be? While flash is sort of out of fashion at the moment, I’ve been hearing rumors of a resurgence- The New Yorker has a flash fiction series going on this summer, for instance-so perhaps it’s time to remind ourselves what very short stories can do. Davis didn’t invent flash fiction, but she is certainly its most famous-and perhaps its best-practitioner. This weekend, Lydia Davis-crowned master of the very short story, not to mention a preeminent translator of classic French literature-turns 70.