200 flash stories longlisted
(1285 flash stories submitted in total)
Jeffery | Abbie Tingstad |
Miracle | Adam Tamashasky |
Third Course | Alan Cole |
WHEN YOU WISH UPON A STAR | Alex Reece Abbott |
A FREE LUNCH | Alex Reece Abbott |
SOMETHING SWEET TO FINISH | Alex Reece Abbott |
The Gentleman | Alistair Daniel |
Shooting Season | Allison Browning |
Escape | Angela Hickey |
The Hungry Goddess | Anita Lehmann |
#Teaching Moment | Ann-Marie Jerman |
Late-Night Takeaway | Anna McGrail |
Penelope | Anna McGrail |
The Man in her Bed | Anne Crosse |
Shadows and Dreams | Annette Bower |
through slipstreams | AYDIN MEHMET ALI |
The Little Girl Inside Me | Beata Anna Fijalkowska |
Ivy | Bernadette Gallagher |
Tipping Point | Bernie McQuillan |
The loves of Efraim Cotter | Beth Evans |
Daughter | Beth Grosart |
GOTCHA | Breda Nathan |
The Button at the End of the World | Brian Quat |
Fruit Vines | Bridget Helwig |
Doubling Down | Bruce Christiansen |
THE RIDE | Brynn Carroll |
The Bird Kitchen | bryony doran |
Why? | C Pringle |
You Should Have Known | Calysta Sylvester |
I might go to Spain | Carol Jones |
The Transformation | Caroline McCartney |
First Time | Carrie Beckwith |
Not so Flash | Carrie Beckwith |
New Years Eve | Celine Mescall |
The Final | Celine West |
The soul is symphonic (Little Red Riding Hood in midlife) |
Ceridwen Buckmaster |
Too good to be true | Charles Knightley |
Comrades | Charlie Weaver Rolfe |
Trash Fish | chloe wilson |
Gravity | Christian Cook |
Full Circle | Christina Eagles |
Pierrot | Christina Eagles |
How to Survive | christina Sanders |
Making a Man | christina Sanders |
My Hewo | CJ Hribal |
Witness | clare proctor |
Banana Squash | clare proctor |
Promises | clare proctor |
Men in Elk Country | Coleman Pape |
Horny Toad | Colin Houghton |
Winter | Crystal Huynh |
Suburban Spy | Cynthia Buck |
HOLIDAY CONVERSATIONS IN MARRIED LIFE |
damien donnelly |
She Nose | Dave Joy |
The Comedy | David Armstrong |
A Small Price | David Steward |
Life in Lost Canyon | Dawn Lowe |
Why | Dawn Lowe |
Falling Short of a Lou Reed Song | Deirdre Daly |
Rapunzel | Deirdre Daly |
A Small Inconvenience | Denise Drespling |
50 Years | Derek Keane |
When Lorca Broke My Heart | Devon Ronner |
Too Close for Comfort | E.L Norry |
Noise | Eamon Mc Guinness |
The Muse | Emily Devane |
Life Sentence | Emma Rea |
A Taste for Rednecks | Ericka Olsen Stefano |
The Flute | Evelyn Walsh |
Billy | Filipa (aka ‘Kaori’) Komuro (aka ‘Crawford’) |
Family Holidays | Gillian Walker |
Only you’re not | Gina Headden |
The Proposal | Hannah Shepard |
Wasted | Iain Napier |
Dmitri my friend | Iain Napier |
Jackpot | Iain Napier |
Flash | Ian Duckworth |
A Prodigal Prays For Harlem in Winter |
Isabella David McCaffrey |
Forwards, backwards, sideways | Jackie Burgoyne |
Wait | Jackie Davis |
Love Post GFC | James Balian |
Misconception | James Murtha |
Her First Steps | Jamie Stacey |
The Love I Don’t Tell | Jamie Stacey |
The Plastic Banana | Jane Avery |
The wish list | Jane Fraser |
When the power goes off | Jane Fraser |
There you go | Jane Fraser |
Burying the Truth | Jane Rogers |
Tea time | Janet Duignan |
The games people play | Janet Duignan |
Butterfly Buns | Jason Akehurst |
Song | Jason Jackson |
Girl, Bridge | Jason Jackson |
Paper Chain Dolls | Jennifer Cairns |
The Professor | Jerome McFaden |
The marriage of Lennie and Mike | John Mulligan |
Shadow or Shade | John O’Connor |
Our Billy | John Stockdill |
Cheesecloth | John Wheway |
Exclusive Control | Jon Nixon |
THE POWER OF FRIGHT | JONATHAN FRANK |
The Switch | Jude Higgins |
Upstairs Downstairs | Jude Higgins |
White Matter | Julianna Holland |
The Age of Progress | Karen Baker |
Regrets | Kate Mahony |
Camp B | Katerina protopsaltis |
The World of Modern Ballet | Katerina protopsaltis |
TV VS WALKING | Katerina protopsaltis |
Lana’s Day as a Poet | Katherine West |
The Dog Will Be Fine | Katherine West |
The Golden Toilet | Kenneth Francis |
The Re-gifting of Sisterly Love | Kerrin O’Sullivan |
Before the Tsunami | Kirsty Seymour-Ure |
Jill | Kyle Macdowell |
68th street | Larry Fondation |
Beyond Inside | Laurence Davies |
Lost at sea | Lee Farnsworth |
Broken | Lee Farnsworth |
Cafe de Paris (Geneva, Switzerland) |
Linda Nemec Foster |
The Life and Times of Mary Margaret McBride |
Linda Rathburn |
Shopping List | Lisa Derrick |
The Presage | Lisa Fransson |
SERIAL DATER | Loraine Felce |
CARE (taking) | Lynn Blair |
The Task List | Maire Ryan |
Not thirty yet | Margaret Callaghan |
Falling | Margo Barnes |
Epilogue to a Cutter’s Handbook | Maria Kaplun |
Home | Marie Boland |
Tick-tock | Marie Parkins |
The Talent | Marjorie K. Kennedy |
Land Of Stones | Mark Smith |
Robots | Mark Sutz |
Wreck | Mark Sutz |
Com | Marked |
Macaroon Bar | martin shiel |
Three little words | maureen flynn |
The Great Wheel Turns | Maureen Gallagher |
The Shortest Distance Between Two Places |
Melissa Ostrom |
SOMETIME AHEAD | Michael Kirby |
BLAST FROM THE PAST | Michael Kirby |
DARKROOM | Michelle Allford |
Nephew | Michelle Coyne |
Twig | Michelle Wright |
Rare Expectations | Monica Goldberg |
Earth Excavation Summary | Monica Hileman |
Regret | Nancy Ludmerer |
Tiffy | Nancy Ludmerer |
Transformation | Nicholas Ruddock |
Short back and sides. | Noel Wills |
Animals | Pamela Banayoti |
Fifty Knots | Pat Murphy |
Candy | patria hatami |
A Full House | Patricia Demery |
Oranges are not the only fruit | Patricia Kyne |
Thank You For Holding | Paul Bassett Davies |
Pigs for Breakfast | Paul Rankin |
His Journey | Paul Stabell |
Ice | Pauline Murphy |
An equal opportunities employer | PJ Stephenson |
The Other Lucy Jordan | Polly Hall |
A Fine Goodbye | Ren Watson |
The Bridge | Richard Weems |
Edacious | Riona Judge McCormack |
MACKEREL | Robert Barrett |
BOY | Robert Barrett |
The Owl and the Pussy-Cat | Roger Vickery |
Soul-Surfing | Ron Jones |
Maud Yearns to Conform | Rose Servitova |
Fishing With Frank Sinatra | Ruby Speechley |
The Ride | Rucha Modak |
Road Kill | Russell Reader |
When Your Babies are Dried… | Ruth Tamiatto |
Storm | Sara Roberts |
Not a Party Girl | Sarah Bianchi |
Happy Birthday Victor | seamus scanlon |
The Parking Angel | seamus scanlon |
The Wardrobe | Sharon Bennett |
Appropriation Artist | Sheila Mannix |
Erika Dent has the Last Word | Sheila Mannix |
Compensation | Simon Kensdale |
Cancer | Siobhan Devoy |
Accidents | Stella MacAleese |
Dark Eyes | Stephanie Shields |
Trade-Off | Sultana Banulescu |
Boxing Day | Susan McCreery |
Bullet Points | Susan Zatland |
Missing | Tony O’Prey |
When Philippa Met Ava | Tony Tysoe |
What You Wish For | Tom Scruton |
MEET ME IN BELFAST | trish leake |
Falling | Una Mannion |
My father’s dog | Veronica Bright |
Buy One Get One Free | Wallace Barnes |
Barbs | West Foster |
Some Enchanted Evening | Will Ingrams |
A gap in the curtains | William Konarzewski |
Explanations | Xanthi Barker |
Vivid, astute, gripping, evocative. These stories utterly transported me. – Sarah Hall (Short Story)
In the landscape of emotion and folly, Flash writers are a fearless lot – these stories prove it. – Michelle Elvy (Flash Fiction)
… combining the personal and particular with the universal, each touching in surprising ways … experiences that burn deep, that need to be told. – Sean Lusk (Memoir)
Strong poems. First place is a poem I wish I’d written! – Billy Collins (Poetry)
More… a showcase of disquiet, tension, subversion and surprise …
so many skilled pieces … gem-like, compressed and glinting, little worlds in entirety that refracted life and ideas … What a joy!
– Sarah Hall
… memoirs pinpointing precise
feelings of loss and longing and desire.
– Sean Lusk
What a pleasure to watch these poets’ minds at work, guiding us this way and that.
– Billy Collins
‘… delightful, lively send-up … A vivid imagination is at play here, and a fine frenzy is the result.’ – Billy Collins
‘… laying frames of scenic detail to compose a lyric collage … enticing … resonates compellingly. … explosive off-screen drama arises through subtly-selected detail. Sharp, clever, economical, tongue-in-cheek.’ – Tracey Slaughter
Brave stories of danger and heart and sincerity.
Some risk everything outright, some are desperately quiet, but their intensity lies in what is unsaid and off the page.
These are brilliant pieces from bright, new voices.
A thrill to read.
~ Emily Ruskovich
I could see great stretches of imagination. I saw experimentation. I saw novelty with voice and style. I saw sentences that embraced both meaning and music. ~ Colum McCann
MoreThese glorious pieces have spun across the globe – pit-stopping in Japan, the Aussie outback, Vancouver, Paris, Amsterdam and our own Hibernian shores – traversing times past, present and imagined future as deftly as they mine the secret tunnels of the human heart. Enjoy the cavalcade. – Mia Gallagher
MoreThe standard is high, in terms of the emotional impact these writers managed to wring from just a few pages. – Billy O’Callaghan
Loop-de-loopy, fizz, and dazzle … unique and compelling—compressed, expansive, and surprising. – Sherrie Flick
Every page oozes with a sense of place and time. – Marti Leimbach
Energetic, dense with detail … engages us in the act of seeing, reminds us that attention is itself a form of praise. – Ellen Bass
MoreDead Souls has the magic surplus of meaning that characterises fine examples of the form – Neel Mukherjee
I was looking for terrific writing of course – something Fish attracts in spades, and I was richly rewarded right across the spectrum – Vanessa Gebbie
Really excellent – skilfully woven – Chris Stewart
Remarkable – Jo Shapcott
The practitioners of the art of brevity and super-brevity whose work is in this book have mastered the skills and distilled and double-distilled their work like the finest whiskey.
More€12 (incl. p&p) Sunrise Sunset by Tina Pisco Read Irish Times review by Claire Looby Surreal, sad, zany, funny, Tina Pisco’s stories are drawn from gritty experience as much as the swirling clouds of the imagination. An astute, empathetic, sometimes savage observer, she brings her characters to life. They dance themselves onto the pages, […]
MoreHow do we transform personal experience of pain into literature? How do we create and then chisel away at those images of others, of loss, of suffering, of unspeakable helplessness so that they become works of art that aim for a shared humanity? The pieces selected here seem to prompt all these questions and the best of them offer some great answers.
– Carmen Bugan.
What a high standard all round – of craft, imagination and originality: and what a wide range of feeling and vision.
Ruth Padel
I was struck by how funny many of the stories are, several of them joyously so – they are madcap and eccentric and great fun. Others – despite restrained and elegant prose – managed to be devastating. All of them are the work of writers with talent.
Claire Kilroy
The writing comes first, the bottom line comes last. And sandwiched between is an eye for the innovative, the inventive and the extraordinary.
MoreA new collection from around the globe: innovative, exciting, invigorating work from the writers and poets who will be making waves for some time to come. David Mitchell, Michael Collins, David Shields and Billy Collins selected the stories, flash fiction, memoirs and poems in this anthology.
MoreReading the one page stories I was a little dazzled, and disappointed that I couldn’t give the prize to everybody. It’s such a tight format, every word must count, every punctuation mark. ‘The Long Wet Grass’ is a masterly bit of story telling … I still can’t get it out of my mind.
– Chris Stewart
The perfectly achieved story transcends the limitations of space with profundity and insight. What I look for in fiction, of whatever length, is authenticity and intensity of feeling. I demand to be moved, to be transported, to be introduced into other lives. The stories I have selected for this anthology have managed this. – Ronan Bennett, Short Story Judge.
MoreI sing those who are published here – they have done a very fine job. It is difficult to create from dust, which is what writers do. It is an honour to have read your work. – Colum McCann
MoreThe entries into this year’s Fish Short Story Prize were universally strong. From these the judges have selected winners, we believe, of exceptional virtue. – Carlo Gebler
MoreI was amazed and delighted at the range and quality of these stories. Every one of them was interesting, well-written, beautifully crafted and, as a short-story must, every one of them focused my attention on that very curtailed tableau which a short-story necessarily sets before us. – Michael Collins
MoreThese stories voice all that is vibrant about the form. – Gerard Donovan. Very short stories pack a poetic punch. Each of these holds its own surprise, or two. Dive into these seemingly small worlds. You’ll come up anew. – Angela Jane Fountas
MoreEach of the pieces here has been chosen for its excellence. They are a delightfully varied assortment. More than usual for an anthology, this is a compendium of all the different ways that fiction can succeed. I invite you to turn to ‘All the King’s Horses’. The past is here. Begin.
– Michel Faber
Literary anthologies, especially of new work, act as a kind of indicator to a society’s concerns. This Short Story collection, such a sharp and useful enterprise, goes beyond that. Its internationality demonstrates how our concerns are held in common across the globe. – Frank Delaney
MoreFrom the daily routine of a career in ‘Spoonface’, to the powerful, recurring image of a freezer in ‘Shadow Lives’. It was the remarkable focus on the ordinary that made these Fish short stories such a pleasure to read. – Hugo Hamilton
MoreIn a world where twenty screens of bullshit seem to be revolving without respite … there is nothing that can surpass the ‘explosion of art’ and its obstinate insistence on making sense of things. These dedicated scribes, as though some secret society, heroically, humbly, are espousing a noble cause.
– Pat McCabe
It’s supposed to be a short form, the good story, but it has about it a largeness I love. There is something to admire in all these tales, these strange, insistent invention. They take place in a rich and satisfying mixture of places, countries of the mind and heart. – Christopher Hope
MoreThere are fine stories in this new anthology, some small and intimate, some reaching out through the personal for a wider, more universal perspective, wishing to tell a story – grand, simple, complex or everyday, wishing to engage you the reader. – Kate O’Riodan
MoreI feel like issuing a health warning with this Fish Anthology these stories may seriously damage your outlook – Here the writers view the world in their unique way, and have the imagination, talent, and the courage to refine it into that most surprising of all art forms the short story. – Clem Cairns.
MoreEvery story in this book makes its own original way in the world. knowing which are the telling moments, and showing them to us. And as the narrator of the winning story casually remarks, ‘Sometimes its the small things that amaze me’ – Molly McCloskey
MoreThe stories here possess the difference, the quirkiness and the spark. They follow their own road and their own ideas their own way. It is a valuable quality which makes this collection a varied one. Read it, I hope you say to yourself like I did on many occasions, ‘That’s deadly. How did they think of that?’ – Eamonn Sweeney
MoreReally good short stories like these, don’t read like they were written. They read like they simply grew on the page. – Joseph O’Connor
MoreThe writers in this collection can write short stories . . . their quality is the only thing they have in common. – Roddy Doyle
MoreThis is the first volume of short stories from Ireland’s newest publishing house. We are proud that fish has enabled 15 budding new writers be published in this anthology, and I look forward to seeing many of them in print again.
More12 Miles Out was selected by David Mitchell as the winner of the Fish Unpublished Novel Award.
A love story, thriller and historical novel; funny and sad, uplifting and enlightening.
You only know who you can’t trust. You can’t trust the law, because there’s none in New Ireland. You can’t trust the Church, because they think they’re the law. And you can’t trust the State, because they think they’re the Church And most of all, you can’t trust your friends, because you can’t remember who they were anymore.
MoreA memoir of urban life, chronicled through its central character, Mackey. From momentary reflections to stories about his break with childhood and adolescence, the early introduction to the Big World, the discovery of romance and then love, the powerlessness of ordinary people, the weaknesses that end in disappointment and the strengths that help them seek redemption and belonging.
MoreIan Wild’s stories mix Monty Python with Hammer Horror, and the Beatles with Shakespeare, but his anarchic style and sense of humour remain very much his own in this collection of tall tales from another planet. Where else would you find vengeful organs, the inside story of Eleanor Rigby, mobile moustaches, and Vikings looting a Cork City branch of Abracababra?
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