This book was assigned for a contemporary fiction class I took and I only read half of it, going back to read the rest. Some of the short-shorts are amazing, others... not so. Perfect read for bus/transit.

A book of 'short-short stories,' which the editor defines as stories under 2,000 words. The central question here is whether or not this is a genre. Some of the stories seem artificially compressed, as if their authors had to telegraph their thoughts to fit the word limit. Others, among the most successful, read like excerpts from longer stories or fragments of novels. (Joyce Carol Oates's is an example.) Quite a few use surrealist juxtaposition as a principal reductive strategy. Others are attempts at parables or allegories, but they tend to be awkward, ill-conceived, or randomly associative, or campy. Very few seem to be fully realized and optimal at their present length. So the collection is strained, and even aside from questions of quality, the 'short-short story' does not work as a new kind of fiction. Unless fourth-generation North American surrealism or belated revivals of absurdism are sufficient organizational strategies, and unless aphorisms, epigrams, and prose poems are allowed into the category of 'short-short stores,' then almost none of these work as independent forms.

And then there's the question of quality. Very few are good. Among the best: contributions by Peter Orner, Sam Shepard, Oates, Frederick Adolf Paola, Larissa Amir, Elizabeth Berg, Hon McNally, David Foster Wallace, and Donald Frame. Most of the rest are artificially compressed, arcane, pointlessly or aimlessly whimsical, raw and indigestible, or just trite. ( )

A nice variety--some stories held my interest longer than others after I came to the end of the last sentence.

I like to keep collections such as this one in the bathroom, where it's easy to read a few pages at a time, and absorb each story a little bit after reading it, as opposed to reading them (or too many) all at once.

My favorites probably won't be your favorites, but maybe I'll come back and mention those later. ( )