Sudden Flash Youth: 65 Short Short Stories Edited by Christine Perkins Hazuka, Tom Hazuka, and Mark Budman

In need of a short story? An extremely short story?  Check out Sudden Flash Youth.  65 short short stories—none of them longer than four pages— is a worthwhile place to start looking for the shortest fiction that is closer to the “highly sophisticated” end of the text complexity spectrum.  Readers with a preference for an urban voice can go straight to “A Whole Other,” which deftly reveals the differences between what we think and what we say and do.  Those who enjoy the Twist anthologies can  check out “Little Brother ™,” by Bruce Holland Rogers.  Readers in search of  literary experiments may enjoy Voskuil’s eerie “Currents.”  Coming of age themes abound, notably relevant for LGBTQ youth in Konigsberg’s “After” and Soares’ “Haircut.”   Other noteworthy shorts include Hazuka’s “Homeward Bound,” and Dagolds’ fable “The Two Rats and the BB Gun.” Strongly recommended for English Language Arts teachers seeking a fresh crop of very short stories to share with their students. –Jessica Fenster-Sparber

Perkins-Hazuka, Christine, Tom Hazuka and Mark Budman.  Sudden Flash Youth:  65 Short Short Stories.  New York: Persea Books, 2011.  Print.

Click here to view the table of contents and read “Currents.”  Click here to view the publisher’s lesson plan for “Currents.”