Best Microfiction 2021

Meg Pokrass, Gary Fincke, and Amber Sparks, editors


WINNER of the Bronze Medal for a book series in the 2021 Independent Publisher Book Awards


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 award-winning author Amber Sparks serving as final judge.


“This collection of micro-stories teems with energy and talent. To pick this up and read it is to feel the pulse of our world: the heartbreak, the strangeness, the vast variety of voices and desires, the coming of the future. This is exactly what I want to read.” Deb Olin Unferth

“I look forward to each year's Best Microfiction because it promises a view of life through a miniature, fractured lens. I'm enlivened by the odd shapes of these stories and the odd stories those shapes invite in, as if shopping in a Borgesian flea market. I'm reminded how the small, the quiet, tend to have the most interesting things to say.” Grant Faulkner

“Amber Sparks’ introduction is a gauntlet thrown down as she cites inspiration and bravery as the defining attributes of the brilliant stories in Best Microfiction 2021. The pulse of these microfictions is operating at the speed of light, the fever a white heat of sound.” Pamela Painter

“In only a few years, Best Microfiction has established itself as one of the most exciting anthologies of new fiction. If short stories are airplanes, the tiny miracles in this collection are hummingbirds.” James Tate Hill, author of Blind Man’s Bluff and editor of Monkeybicycle

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.
Amber Sparks is the guest editor. She is the author of The Unfinished World and Other Stories, and the forthcoming I Do Not Forgive You: Revenges and Other Stories, both from Liveright. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Tin House, Granta, The Cut, The Paris Review, and others. You can find her most days at @ambernoelle.