Customer Reviews

Sudden Fiction International: 60 Short Stories

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This anthology is an excellent source for learning about various cultures and also for pure entertainment. I have used this as a text in a graduate level course. The stories have universal themes and so can be savored by all. Some are culturally specific whereas others are about one culture. Many are slice of life stories..........Enjoy!

A great book for those with short attention spans, short story writers (or aspiring short story writers), and those who want to see the variety of short shorts available. These stories are short but they have a sharp impact on the reader. The Afternotes section provides extra information about the author, which is often not included in short story collections. It also provides interviews with the authors on their inspiration for the story of theirs included in this volume and occasional interviews with translators on how they set about getting the most accurate translation of the story.

This is a great book to buy for someone who doesn't have the patience to read. There are some brilliant works in here, some of them only a few pages long. Leave it in the bathroom or somewhere else you have a captive audience. You just might turn someone on to reading.

This is priceless collection of very short stories from all over the world.In this cosmopolitan range of stories many known authors such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez,Julio Cortazar,Heinrich Boll,Nadine Gordimer and Mrozeck are joined by those we will come to know better later by reading their well crafted short short stories.
I have translated 37 of these collection into Farsi.The Farsi title is Dastan e Nagahan meaning Sudden Fiction.
Thanks to the talented authors of this anthology and its fine predecessors,Sudden Fiction and other titles like Flash Fiction and Sudden Fiction Continued.
I recommend the readers to buy this book and enjoy its taste in discovering a world wide scenery,multi cultural surprises and find new friends.
The stories are indeed perfect for bed time reading

~~It's a great book to have. You can read it on the subway and chew on a few stories in one transit, or just scan the beginnings and look for what catches your eye, or you can curl up on a rainy day and devour the whole book. You can consider this book an appetizer to an entree of international literature. It whets the palate. There are some very good writers, from many cultures, and writing in many languages, with many types of stories. Rarely can you find such a wide range of talent in one book. There¡¯s Argentine Julio Cortazar¡¯s zany surrealism, Margaret Atwood of Canada with her bizarrely constructed feminist romance deconstruction, and Krishnan Varma of India with an exotic tale of poverty. Each of these stories is immensely different but all are captivating. Most stories are marvelous; they have no wasted words yet come with tightly woven plots and compelling characters. These stories are a marvel to see and a must for anyone interested in fiction. It's incredible how much depth and diversity is possible in such a short space. Mark Twain once said "the difference between the right word and almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug." Here is lightning (and the bug?) bottled up.

What I like about this flash anthology is that it gives the reader flashes from authors living in different parts of the world, not just Americans. It's interesting to read the different perspectives the authors bring to their stories.

This is definitely worth buying!

Salvatore Buttaci, author of FLASHING MY SHORTS

I used this for a class in creative writing. Anytime I got writers block I would read a few of the stories in Sudden Fiction. It didn't always help but all the stories are highly entertaining and from time to time the stories inspired me to pen up my own experiences in their voice or mine. All in all, whether you're using it seriously or not, you'll enjoy this book's short stories. There's a wide variety for all moods and writing styles. It'd be hard not to like at least some of the stories and if you're a writing student or pro I'd think this type of material would be essential for those lean times.

From an objective standpoint, this is a good collection, but for some reason ... reading it was not pleasurable. There's a lovely story by Isak Dinesen, but nothing else haunted me. It may be your cup of tea though.

A long time ago when I watched too many stand up comedians to remember them all, I heard one say that he watched MTV because everything is over in three minutes. It can't stay crappy forever. The next one has to be better. The joke being that every video was terrible and there was no relief. Not entirely true, but there was a definite lack that made the experience of watching MTV rather tedious; no matter how many of them might have been pretty good. The overall effect was just wearisome. Of course, these days the experience of watching MTV is just dread and stupidity without a shred of quality. Sure, you can watch it ironically and laugh at the stupid people but how long can you enjoy watching morons on reality shows before you have to admit that you're a moron yourself?

Anyhow, this is book is a collection of short short stories. No story is longer than five pages long. Now that should make it boredom proof; but in many cases the story is just there to fill some space. Several of the stories are pointless. Many of them are just dreary little tales about dreary little people - the kind that made Arthur Miller money. That's not to say that there aren't some genuine classics in the mix. The first story about the girl falling off the roof is beautiful. The Margaret Atwood "Happy Endings" is hilarious. The Gabriel Garcia Marquez story is sweaty for lack of a better word.

However, the really good stories are few and far between. The good stories are overwhelmed by the dull stories. Had the editors been a little more diligent in editing out the dull stories the collection might have been better. However, the overall effect wears you down and it becomes a chore to read the whole thing.