Flash Fiction International

by Robert Shapard James Thomas

  Alberto Chimal is one of Mexico’s most prolific writers of experimental fiction, including flash and Twitter fiction. In the United States his work has appeared in World Literature Today and The Kenyon Review. He is author of the novels Los esclavos and La torre y el jardín as well as many books of short fiction.

  Nuala Ní Chonchúir lives in Galway, Ireland. Her fourth short story collection, Mother America, was published in 2012, a chapbook of short-short stories in 2013 in the United States, and her second novel in 2014.

  James Claffey was born and raised in Dublin, Ireland. His work has appeared in many magazines; he is the author of a book of stories, Blood a Cold Blue, and the editor of a story collection, Daddy Cool.

  Margaret Jull Costa has been a literary translator for nearly thirty years and has translated novels and short stories by such writers as Eça de Queiroz, Fernando Pessoa, José Saramago, Javier Marías, and Bernardo Atxaga. Her most recent award was the 2012 Calouste Gulbenkian Translation Prize for Teolinda Gersão’s The Word Tree.

  Jim Crace has published novels, short stories, and radio plays. He has won many awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, and has been shortlisted three times for the Booker Prize. He lives in Birmingham, England, with his wife and two children.

  Marco Denevi was an Argentine writer well known for very short stories. His first novel was a bestseller in several languages and adapted for film. His story “Secret Ceremony” was made into a film starring Elizabeth Taylor. He died in 1998.

  Natalie Diaz, a member of the Mojave and Pima Indian tribes, attended Old Dominion University on a full athletic scholarship. After playing professional basketball in Austria, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey, she returned to Old Dominion for an MFA in writing. She was selected for Best New Poets and won the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. She lives in Surprise, Arizona.

  Linh Dinh is the author of five books of poetry and three of prose, including a novel, Love Like Hate. The Village Voice picked Dinh’s Blood and Soap, which has the most generous sampling of his flash fictions, as one of the best books of 2004.

  Brian Doyle is the editor of Portland magazine at the University of Portland and the author of many books of essays, “proems,” and fiction, notably the sprawling novels Mink River and The Plover.

  Patricia Dubrava is a poet, essayist, and translator whose recent translations have appeared in the journals Reunion: The Dallas Review, Metamorphoses, and The Cafe Irreal, and the anthology NewBorder: Contemporary Voices from the Texas/Mexico Border. Dubrava lives in Denver.

  Lane Dunlop was a critically acclaimed translator of French poetry and pre-1960s Japanese literature. His translation of The Late Chrysanthemum: Twenty-one Stories from the Japanese won the Japan-United States Friendship Award for Literary Translation, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters recognized him with an Academy Award in Literature. He died in 2013.

  Stuart Dybek is especially known for his very short stories; flash fiction figures prominently in several of his books, especially his most recent collection, Ecstatic Cahoots. His awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, a PEN/Malamud Prize, a Rea Award for the Short Story, and a Lannan Award for Innovation in the Short Story.

  Berit Ellingsen is a Korean-Norwegian author whose stories have appeared in anthologies and literary journals, including Unstuck, Bluestem, SmokeLong Quarterly, Metazen, and decomP magazinE. Her collection of short stories is Beneath the Skin. Berit admits, when abroad, to pining for the fjords.

  Nathan Englander, co-translator of Etgar Keret’s Suddenly A Knock at the Door, is author of the story collections What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank and For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, as well as the novel The Ministry of Special Cases. He has won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize.

  Tony Eprile is a South African writer who has long been living in the United States. His novel The Persistence of Memory was a New York Times Notable Book. He has taught at universities abroad and in the United States, including the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His story “The Interpreter for the Tribunal” stems from something Desmond Tutu said: that simultaneous interpreters at the Truth and Reconciliation hearings, who had to speak in the first person for both the victims of violence and the perpetrators of it, often had nervous breakdowns.

  Alex Epstein (see his story in Flash Theory) was born in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) and moved to Israel when he was eight years old. His four collections of short stories and three novels have been translated into eight languages. His collections of short-short stories, Blue Has No South and Lunar Savings Time, are available in English.

  Josefina Estrada is a Mexican story writer, novelist, and journalist. Among her books are the story collection Malagato and the novels Desde que Díos amance and Virgen de medianoche. Her work has previously appeared in English in Storm: New Writing from Mexico and Sudden Fiction Latino: Short-Short Stories from the United States and Latin America.

  Muna Fadhil is an Iraqi humanitarian worker and advocate whose main passion is refugees, women’s rights, and ethnic and religious tolerance. Muna mainly writes about her experiences living in wars, under economic sanctions, and with ongoing violence, determined to shed light on these issues.

  Robert Ferguson was born in the UK, where he studied Norwegian in the Scandinavian Studies course at University College, London. He immigrated in 1983 to Norway. He is the award-winning author of radio plays for the BBC, literary biographies, a history of the Vikings, and two novels.

  Anne O. Fisher made her career debut with the critically acclaimed renditions of Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov’s novels The Twelve Chairs and The Little Golden Calf. She has also translated the prose of Polina Klyukina, Ksenia Buksha, Leonid Tishkov, Marina Moskvina, and Margarita Meklina, and, with cotranslator Derek Mong, the poetry of Maxim Amelin.

  Ezra E. Fitz began his literary life at Princeton University, studying under the tutelage of James Irby, C. K. Williams, Jonathan Galassi, and Robert Fagles. His translations of contemporary Latin American literature by Alberto Fuguet and Eloy Urroz have been praised by The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and The Believer, among other publications. He lives with his wife in Tennessee.

  Rubem Fonseca is for many critics Brazil’s greatest living author. His novels and short stories have appeared in a dozen languages, and he has received numerous literary awards, including the Camões Prize, considered the Nobel of Portuguese-language literature.

  Marcela Fuentes is a south Texan living in Atlanta with her husband and small son. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has published fiction in Indiana Review, Vestal Review, Blackbird, and other journals, and her stories are anthologized in Best of the Web and New Stories from the Southwest.

  Alberto Fuguet is a Chilean writer of short stories and novels who is also a film critic and director. In 1999 Time named him one of the fifty most important Latin American writers of the new millennium.

  Avital Gad-Cykman is an Israeli writer living in Brazil. Her short stories, including flash fiction, have appeared in anthologies and in journals such as McSweeney’s, Glimmer Train, Prism International, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Stand (UK). Her collection of flash fiction is Life In, Life Out.

  Petina Gappah is a Zimbabwean writer with law degrees from Cambridge, the University of Graz, and the University of Zimbabwe. She is author of An Elegy for Easterly: Stories; her short fiction and essays have been published in eight countries. She lives with her son Kush in Geneva, where she works as counsel in an international organization.

  Natazsa Goerke was born in Poznanń, Poland. Her four books have been published in Polish as well as in German, Slovak, and Croatian; her stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. In the mid-eighties she emigrated from Poland and after living for a time in Asia now lives in Hamburg.

  Edith Grossman is well known for her translations of major Latin American authors such as Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García
Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa. She was awarded the PEN Ralph Manheim Medal in 2006 for her body of work, and, in 2010, the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute Translation Prize.

  Judd Hampton lives in rural northern Alberta, Canada, with his wife, two children, two dogs, two cats, and two trucks. He works in the oilfield pushing natural gas toward your furnace. His stories have been nominated for the Journey Prize, National Magazine Award, Best American Short Stories, and, twice, the Pushcart Prize.

  George Henson is the translator of two collections of short fiction, Elena Poniatowska’s The Heart of the Artichoke and Luis Jorge Boone’s The Cannibal Night. His translations have appeared in numerous journals, including The Kenyon Review, The Literary Review, World Literature Today, and Words Without Borders.

  Tania Hershman was born in London, moved to Jerusalem in her twenties, and returned to England to serve as writer-in-residence in the Faculty of Science at Bristol University. A science journalist for thirteen years, she gave it up to write fiction and now has two story collections, both of which include flash fiction: My Mother Was an Upright Piano and The White Road and Other Stories. She is founder and editor of The Short Review.

  Michael Hoffman has translated numerous books from the German, most recently Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters and Impromptus: Selected Poems and Some Prose, by Gottfried Benn. He is also a widely published, award-winning poet, editor, and critic. He is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Florida.

  Randa Jarrar grew up in Kuwait and Egypt, and moved to the United States at the age of thirteen. She is the author of the novel A Map of Home, which won the Hopwood Prize and the Arab American Book Award. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Salon, Ploughshares, Utne Reader, Rumpus, and others. She lives in Central California.

  Ian Johnston was for many years a college and university teacher and is now an emeritus professor at the University of Vancouver Island. He is the author of The Ironies of War: An Introduction to Homer’s Iliad and has translated several classic works from Greek, Latin, French, and German.

  Franz Kafka, 1883–1924, wrote novels (The Trial), short stories (“The Metamorphosis,” “A Hunger Artist”), and very short stories. He was one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century.

  Toshiya Kamei holds an MFA in literary translation from the University of Arkansas. His translations include Liliana Blum’s The Curse of Eve and Other Stories, Naoko Awa’s The Fox’s Window and Other Stories, Espido Freire’s Irlanda, and Selfa Chew’s Silent Herons.

  Yasunari Kawabata was a Japanese short story writer and novelist whose works were influenced by Japanese Zen Buddhism and haiku and by European Dadaism and Expressionism. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, becoming the first Japanese recipient of the award.

  Etgar Keret is an Israeli writer known for his short stories, graphic novels, and scriptwriting for film and television. A number of his stories have been made into movies. His books have been translated into many languages.

  Rashid Khattak was born and raised in the Karak district of Pakistan and took his master’s degree in journalism from the University of Peshawar. He writes in Pashto, Urdu, and English, and translates from each to the others. He has worked with many media organizations.

  Chi-young Kim is an award-winning literary translator based in Los Angeles. Her most recent works include Jung-myung Lee’s The Investigation, Sun-mi Hwang’s The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly, and Kyung-sook Shin’s Please Look After Mom, which won the Man Asian Literary Prize.

  Kim Young-ha is a widely translated novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, and translator. His works have won Korea’s top literary awards and been adapted for films and a musical.

  Yin Ee Kiong is a Malaysian writer, social and political activist, and traveler. He has lived and worked in numerous countries, including Sudan and Papua New Guinea. He currently lives in Indonesia. His published works are Postcards from a Foreign Country, Tin Man, and Out of the Tempurung, of which he is coeditor.

  Clifford E. Landers has translated some thirty book-length works from Portuguese, including novels by Rubem Fonseca, João Ubaldo Ribeiro, Jorge Amado, Patrícia Melo, Jô Soares, Chico Buarque, Ignácio de Loyola Brandão, Nélida Piñon, Paulo Coelho, Marcos Rey, and José de Alencar. He is a recipient of the Mário Ferreira Award and author of Literary Translation: A Practical Guide.

  Tara Laskowski is the author of Modern Manners for Your Inner Demons and the senior editor of SmokeLong Quarterly. She lives in Virginia with her husband and son.

  Mónica Lavín is a Mexican writer with eight collections of stories and eight novels. She won the Gilberto Owen Literary Prize for her short story collection Ruby Tuesday no ha muerto. Her 2009 novel Yo, la peor won the Elena Poniatowska Prize for Fiction. Her latest book of stories is Manual para enamorarse. Lavín lives in Mexico City.

  Kirsty Logan lives in Glasgow, where she is the literary editor of The List. Her short fiction and poetry have been published in print and online and exhibited in galleries. Her debut collection of stories is The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales. Her first novel, The Gracekeepers, is forthcoming in 2015.

  Robert Lopez is the author of two novels, Part of the World and Kamby Bolongo Mean River, and a story collection, Asunder. He has taught at the New School, Pratt Institute, Columbia University, and the Solstice MFA Creative Writing Program at Pine Manor College. He lives in Brooklyn, where he was born.

  Antonio López Ortega is the Venezuelan author of six volumes of short stories. He studied literature in Caracas and Hispanic studies in Paris, and was a participant in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.

  Naguib Mahfouz was an Egyptian novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, playwright, and columnist whose work during a seventy-year career has been translated into forty languages. In 1988 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

  Luigi Malerba wrote short stories, historical novels, and screenplays. A leader of Italy’s Neoavanguardia literary movement, he was the recipient of many prestigious awards. He died in 2008.

  Giorgio Manganelli was an Italian journalist, translator, and fiction writer. Italo Calvino said that in Manganelli “Italian literature has . . . an inventor who is irresistible and inexhaustible in his games with language and ideas.” Each “novel” in his collection Centuria is like an ouroboros, the ancient symbol of a serpent or dragon eating its own tail.

  Alberto Manguel was born in Buenos Aires, lived in Israel when his father was ambassador there, then Italy, England, and Canada. He now lives in France, in a medieval presbytery renovated to house his thirty thousand books. Author of five novels, as well as an anthologist (Black Water: The Book of Fantastic Literature) and translator, he has received many prizes and two honorary doctorates.

  Kuzhali Manickavel is the author of two short story collections, Insects Are Just Like You and Me Except Some of Them Have Wings and Things We Found During the Autopsy.

  Henry Martin translates contemporary Italian literature and regularly contributes as a critic to a number of international art magazines. He lives with his wife and their son in the mountains of southern Tyrol not far from Bolzano, Italy.

  W. Martin has published translations from German and Polish that include Michal Witkowski’s Lovetown, Erich Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives, and Natasza Goerke’s Farewells to Plasma, as well as numerous works appearing in anthologies and journals. He has been a fiction editor at Chicago Review and in 2008 received the NEA Literature Fellowship for Translation.

  W. Somerset Maugham, 1874–1965, was a widely traveled and popular British playwright, novelist, and story writer. Among his many novels are Of Human Bondage and The Razor’s Edge. Some say his story “Appointment in Samarra” is based on a ninth-century Arabian Sufi story; others say the story’s origins go back as far as the Babylonian Talmud.

  Peter Zaragoza Mayshle, born and raised in the Philippines, received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan, Ann Arb
or and a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His stories have been published in his home country, the United States, Canada, and in Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine in England. He teaches at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.

  Cate McGowan is a Georgia native whose short story collection True Places Never Are won the Moon City Press Inaugural Fiction Award. It will be published in 2015. Her stories have appeared in literary magazines and glossies such as Glimmer Train, Snake Nation Review, and Tank. She teaches at Valencia College in Florida.

  Jon McGregor is a British novelist and highly awarded short story writer. His most recent book is the collection This Isn’t the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You.

  Anne McLean translates Latin American and Spanish novels, short stories, memoirs, and other writings by authors including Julio Cortázar, Héctor Abad, Evelio Rosero, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Javier Cercas, Ignacio Martínez de Pisón, and Enrique Vila-Matas. She lives in Toronto.

  Frankie McMillan is the author of The Bag Lady’s Picnic and Other Stories and Dressing for the Cannibals. Her stories appear in Best NZ Fiction anthologies. In 2013 she was winner of the NZ National Flash Fiction Day award. She is a writer-in-residence at Canterbury University.

  Pierre J. Mejlak was born on the Mediterranean island of Malta in 1982. His story collections are I Am Waiting for You to Fall with the Rain and What the Night Lets You Say. He has won five Malta National Book Awards and in 2014 won the European Union Prize for Literature. He lives in Brussels.

  Margarita Meklina is a Russian novelist and story writer considered groundbreaking in her prose, which helped redefine Russian literature in the 1990s. She has published five books and has won many awards; she was nominated for The Russian Prize in 2009. She lives in San Francisco.

  Czesław Miłosz, who died in 2004, was a Polish poet and prose writer of Lithuanian origin. “Esse” is usually assumed to be a prose poem, but it has also been noted as a “perfect flash love story.” Miłosz won the Nobel Prize in 1980.