Best Microfiction 2019

Meg Pokrass, Gary Fincke, and Dan Chaon, editors

The Best Microfiction anthology series provides recognition for outstanding literary stories of 400 words or fewer. Co-edited by award-winning microfiction writer/editor Meg Pokrass, and Flannery O’Connor Prize-winning author Gary Fincke, the anthology features the well-known novelist and short story writer Dan Chaon serving as final judge, an exclusive craft-oriented interview with the great Etgar Keret, and an essay about the current state of microfiction written by Robert Scotellaro. The inaugural edition, Best Microfiction 2019, features eighty seven of the world's best very short stories.


“Yes, this is how it is done. Beautiful, brooding, erotic, mysterious, idiosyncratic words shaped into thunderbolts, shocks that reveal what we didn't know we know. Words filled with promise, bewildering and enchanting us. This is flash at its best, flash now.” Jane Ciabattari, columnist, BBC Culture, The Literary Hub

“A terrific collection of ultra-short stories—complex, thrilling, sometimes just crazy-nutball, in the best possible way! Huzzah!” Frederick Barthelme

“These are small, arresting stories that cut right to the heart of the matter, demonstrating that a story well told, no matter how small, expands beyond the space it inhabits.” Robert Scotellaro

“A brilliant, moving, entertaining collection of very short stories, chosen by an editor who is himself a master storyteller. This promises to be a great series. Highly recommended.” Robert Shapard, coeditor W.W. Norton’s Flash Fiction International

“These short short stories prove that length means nothing, that indeed possibilities expand in inverse proportion to word count. These fictions are travel guides, conversations, spell and incantations, language feasts, character studies, lab experiments. They are stories in the wildest sense of the word: stories that push and pull at boundaries, stories that move mountains and dig rivers and do it all while whispering quietly that they can.” Amber Sparks

Meg Pokrass, series editor, is the author of six flash fiction collections. Her work has been internationally anthologized in two Norton Anthology Readers, Best Small Fictions, 2018 and 2019, and has appeared in 350 literary magazines both online and in print. She received the Blue Light Book Award in 2016. She currently serves as Flash Challenge Editor at Mslexia Magazine, Festival Curator for Flash Fiction Festival, U.K. and Founding/Managing Editor of New Flash Fiction Review.
Gary Fincke, editor, has published thirty-one books of poetry, short fiction, and nonfiction, most recently, Bringing Back the Bones: New and Selected Poems, A Room of Rain: Stories, and The Killer’s Dog: Stories.
Dan Chaon is the guest editor. His most recent book is Ill Will, a novel.