Review of Shapard & Thomas (eds) "Sudden Fiction"

[David M. Chess]

Shapard & Thomas (eds) "Sudden Fiction"
Reviewed by David M. Chess

Top Ten reasons to get Shapard and Thomas's "Sudden Fiction":

10. It gathers together in one place seventy wonderful
stories that would otherwise be hard to find, since many
outlets simply don't do short-shorts.

9. You may come to realize that it's possible to do
almost everything that a fiction author might want to
do in just two or three pages, and you may no longer
spend so much time reading novels, and therefore have
more time to spend staying competitive in the global
economy.

8. You can amuse yourself trying to figure out how they
decided what order to put the stories in.

7. You can actually read a story all the way through in
between demands from your five-year-old for another
game, another book, another ride.

6. It costs less than twenty cents a story.

5. The four Afterwords, in which the authors of the
stories ruminate about the short-short genre, and what
it should really be called.

4. If you haven't got "Sudden Fiction International" yet,
getting this book might inspire you to buy that one.

3. The warm human realism of Mary Robison's "Yours",
Elizabeth Tallent's "No One's a Mystery", and so on.

2. The haunting gemlike surrealism of Barthelme's
"The King of Jazz", Jane Martin's "Twirler", and so on.

And the Number One reason to get Shapard and Thomas's "Sudden
Fiction":

1. Even if you're the sort of person who gets impatient with
multi-screen Web pages, and who likes book reviews that
are in the form of Ten Best Reasons lists, these stories
will give you deep and marvelous literature without
stressing your attention-span.

OK, so it's not a very funny list.

Do I look like David Letterman?

%E Robert Shapard
%E James Thomas
%B Sudden Fiction
%I Gibbs M. Smith, Inc. / A Peregrine Smith Book
%C Salt Lake City
%D 1986
%G ISBN 0-87905-265-1
%P 264 pp.
%O trade paperback, US$12.95
%T The King of Jazz
%A Donald Barthelme
%T Twirler
%A Jane Martin
%T Yours
%A Mary Robison
%T No One's a Mystery
%A Elizabeth Tallent
%O etc etc etc

(Other book reviews may be found, with a little exploration,
at "http://users.aol.com/dmchess".)

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