Best Microfiction 2025

Meg Pokrass, Gary Fincke, and Dawn Raffel, 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 Dawn Raffel serving as final judge, and the world's best very short short stories.

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“I know of no better representation of all that’s happening right now with the micro story than the Best Microfiction anthology. What a coming together of voices, energies, experiments, visions. This is not a collection to work through, as a reader. This is a collection to savor.” Scott Garson, Wigleaf

“When you read a piece under 400 words that stops you in your tracks, it only makes you want to read another with such power. Fortunately, thankfully, we have Best Microfictions, which gives us a book of the best. They may be short, but the pieces will last you a year, making their way into your heart and mind—just in time for next year’s edition.” Brian Mihok, matchbook

Meg Pokrass, series editor, is the author of 7 flash fiction collections, an award-winning collection of prose poetry, 2 flash-novellas and 2 new co-written collections of flash, The House of Grana Padano, co-written with Jeff Friedman (Pelekinesis, 2022) and Disappearing Debutantes, co-written with Aimee Parkison (Outpost 19, 2023). Her work has appeared in hundreds of literary magazines and international anthologies including Electric Literature, Wigleaf, Washington Square Review, American Journal of Poetry, McSweeney's has appeared in 2 Norton anthologies of the flash fiction form: New Micro (W.W. Norton & Co., 2018), Flash Fiction International (W.W. Norton & Co., 2015). Meg is the Founding Editor of New Flash Fiction Review, Flash Challenge Columnist for Mslexia Magazine, and teaches private microfiction workshops.
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.
Dawn Raffel is the author of six books. Her latest, Boundless as the Sky, is a collection incorporating flash, micro-fiction, and images in its exploration of early 20th Century history, amid the rise of both fascism and technology. Previous books include The Strange Case of Dr. Couney, The Secret Life of Objects, two other collections of very short stories, and a novel in vignettes. She has taught creative writing at International Literary Seminars (previously Summer Literary Seminars) in Kenya, Russia, Lithuania, Georgia, and Canada, as well as at Columbia University and at the Center for Fiction in New York. She has also had a long career as a magazine editor, including at O, The Oprah Magazine, which she helped launch, and at the Northwest Review, where she recently served as fiction editor. Her work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including BOMB, Conjunctions, O, The Oprah Magazine, Big Other, Fence, NOON, The Quarterly,The Iowa Review, The Antioch Review, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, Providence Noir, Best Small Fictions, New Micro, and Best Microfiction.