Hold Still Fast

Sean Pravica

Hold Still Fast is a collection of 200 short vignettes of 50 words and under, prose snapshots of a wide range of colorful characters. Moments of reckoning and realizations of loss, sensual celebrations of the physical world and mysteries whose answers lie barely out of reach, these stories are complete in their telling yet rich in implication. They are the stories we tell when we see more than we say, when we feel more than we know. Immediate. Intimate. Fast stories with time held still.


“Reading Hold Still Fast is like discovering a shoebox of Polaroid i-Zone pictures, each the size of a postage stamp. It’s a collection of saturated snapshots that hint at the lives and worlds beyond the edges of their small frames.” Kara Vernor, author of Because I Wanted to Write You a Pop Song

“The stories in Sean Pravica's Hold Still Fast shake and settle in a mere fifty words each, leaving the reader with a sense of awe and mystery. The white space between the words, the vibrant characters, a spectrum of emotions bubbling underneath, shining in intimacy and immediacy.” Tara Isabel Zambrano, author

“In Hold Still Fast, Sean Pravica knows our attention span may be dwindling, but readers are still looking for a jolt, an awakening, that only stories can create. Nestled in the chestnuts of 50 word stories, Pravica creates distilled worlds that crackle with evocative settings and characters. Imagine watching the world through the falsely secure slat of your window blinds. These stories are full of mystery and gossip, a reader's delight of a richly concocted morsel of literature.” Tommy Dean, author of Special Like the People on TV

Hold Still Fast by Sean Pravica captures the breadth of life. Each vignette is a snapshot of joy, woe, mundanity, melancholy, brilliance, the fragile bonds that knit us together, longing or some other snapshot of simply being. Both mesmerizing and elusive—Pravica encourages the reader to adopt noticing and appreciating as a posture as opposed to an action. As Pravica writes, It became obvious. It became truth. God is motion. Every moment the big bang. William Bortz, author of The Grief We’re Given

Sean Pravica is a Californian writer. His fiction and poetry have appeared in over 40 journals. His novel Stumbling Out the Stable was published by Pelekinesis in 2015. His writing has run the gamut from ghostwriting about consumer goods and health topics to penning press releases and newspaper articles. His work has been nominated for several writing awards including the Bea Hollefelder Award in Creative Writing, which he won.