flash fiction – Andy writes!

Friday Five: favorite short fiction of 2025

There are so many great short stories being published these days that it’s hard to keep track of them all. So many deserve to be read and savored. Maybe you’ve read some of the five below that I’ve selected as my favorites of 2025. If not, I hope you’ll give each of them a read. And if you’ve read any of them, maybe give them another read.

All of these stories were published during the 2025 calendar year in online literary magazines and are publicly accessible at the time of this writing. I present them here unranked and in no particular order.

Friday Five: grand openings

How powerful first lines can draw your reader into your story.

One lesson the professors at journalism school drilled into my head was the importance of crafting a compelling first paragraph (aka the lede in news parlance).

The opening paragraph is the most important element of your story. It must grab readers’ attention and get them to read more, so it must be finely crafted and honed to its sharpest possible point.

The same applies to more literary writing–whether a novel, a short story, or a creative nonfiction essay. These five opening sentences from some recent stories and essays do a good job of hooking the reader. Each example below comes from The Pushcart Prize XLIX: Best of the Small Presses 2025 Edition. And while there are other notable pieces I could have pulled from this anthology, I chose these five because they are great and because you can also read them online, for free.