The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God and Other Stories by Etgar Keret (See my full review for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.) Although there are fewer overall highlights than in the first volume, this is an excellent snapshot of contemporary super-short story writing, recommended for story lovers and newbies alike. It’s remarkable how concisely a coming of age and loss of blind faith are conveyed. They’ve saved the best for last in this collection, though: the late Brian Doyle’s “My Devils,” in which an Irish-American boy learns how to interpret the adult world by deciphering what people say versus what they mean.
Two stand-outs are “States of Matter,” Tara Laskowski’s deliciously creepy story of revenge aided by a gravedigger and Matthew Baker’s “The President’s Doubles,” in which an island nation becomes so protective of its imperiled leader that he ends up a prisoner. Symbols and similes are also crucial to conveying shorthand meaning. (I reviewed the two previous volumes for BookTrib and the Small Press Book Review.) Starting with a zinger of a first line is one strategy for making a short-short story stand out, and there are certainly some excellent opening sentences here. Now in its third year, the Best Small Fictions anthology collects the year’s best short stories under 1000 words. Mini reviews below…īest Small Fictions 2017, edited by Amy Hempel In the end I made it through one anthology of flash fiction this month, and read parts of three other story collections. I toyed with the wild idea of only reading short stories as my fiction for the month of September, but it was never really going to happen: I just don’t find short stories compelling enough, and in some ways they feel like hard work – every few pages, it seems, you have to adjust to a new scene and set of characters.
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