Customer Reviews

Brevity & Echo: An Anthology of Short Short Stories

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The longest of the seventy-three stories in "Brevity & Echo" is 1,400 words. The shortest is 55. Most seem to be about 300 to 400 words. Writing a short story is already a difficult task, but producing one of quality with so few words is even more difficult. The stories in "Brevity & Echo" often push the limits of what constitutes a story in an effort to overcome this difficulty.

Two of the stories, for instance, are just lists. Amanda Holzer's "Love and Other Catastrophes: A Mix Tape" is a list of songs and their artists. Leslie Busler's "Memoir of a Bookshelf" lists book titles. Yet another, Melissa McCracken's "I Always Know It's Over When They Say:," is slightly more than a list but consists of largely disconnected statements (such as "I only bet on college ball").

Two other stories--Ashley Rice's "The ABCs of Family History" and Leslie Busler's "Lovely"--consist of twenty-six sentences each and proceed, quite literally, from A to Z. The first sentence of each story begins with A, the second with B, and so on until the twenty-sixth, which begins (no surprise here) with Z.

These last two exemplify what "Brevity & Echo" seems to be about: experimentation. It did not seem to me that the experimentation always produced the best results, and too many of the stories seemed to be simply exercises rather than finished works. In both of the A-to-Z stories, for instance, I noticed that the sentences were sequential, and seeing the craft exposed made me more conscious of the writing itself than of the story within. Other stories seemed rather pointless, almost pretentious.

However--and this is an important however--, I found several stories that I thought were excellent. Robert Repino's "Pictures of Children Playing" is a story of war that reminded me of the excellent film The Red and the White. Heather Quarles's "A Case for Sterner Prison Sentencing and Reflections on a Personal Tragedy by Bear" is a very clever retelling of the Goldilocks story, this time from the point of view of Baby Bear. And I very much enjoyed Terry Thuemling's "ALFALFA," a 275-word, one-page story of an argument that begins with cryptogram in the Sunday New York Times. Another story, Laurel Dile King's "Special," is one of the most traditional and, at 1,400 words, the longest in the book. This story, an insightful tale of a student destined for the "special" class and her thought process as she gets the news in class, is especially good.

I have read this book many times and it continues to be on my favorites shelf. Beautiful examples of flash fiction. A complete and well-done collection. I'm keeping my copy and am not lending it out. Buy your own.

A sharp, gorgeously crafted collection of concisely expressed wisdom, love, and sorrow. Heart-breaking and lovely at once.