short story – Page 4 – Andrew Careaga

Flood your feed with fabulous flash on National Flash Fiction Day

Today (Saturday, June 15, 2024) is National Flash Fiction Day (NFFD) in Great Britain. But why relegate the celebration of great short short stories to that blessed plot alone? The web is worldwide, after all, and thanks to the internet, we can all take part.

So let’s take this party global. Happy (Inter)National Flash Fiction Day, everyone!

A new home for ‘Baseball 1971’

Thank you, Bulb culture Collective

In publication news, I’m thrilled that a flash fiction I wrote back in the ‘90s has found a new home! The story, “Baseball 1971,” was published this week in the on line literary magazine Bulb Culture Collective. The site specializes in publishing works that were published previously in journals that no longer exist. That is the case with this story, which originally appeared in Fan in 1998 (backstory here).

Many thanks to the folks at Bulb Culture Collective for selecting this for their Shine A Light series of writings.

Follow the journal on Twitter (I mean X) at @BulbCultCo.

Image via Bulb Culture Collective.

Friday Five: fabulous flash

Five great stories I’ve read recently.

As I continue to work on my writing — as I try to learn how to make my writing more compact and forcible — I’ve been paying greater attention to flash fiction lately.

I love how flash fiction writer and editor Tommy Dean describes the genre in a recent Friday Five Q&A on this site. Flash, he says, is “the flash bulb and the reaction in the dark, the scene coming in and out of focus, before being lost.”

I think these five recent flash stories capture that sentiment well. Enjoy.

“Grief and Gravity,” by Barlow Adams (@BarlowAdams on Twitter/X) in The Molotov Cocktail.
“Baby,” by L Mari Harris in Ghost Parachute. She’s on Twitter/X as @LMariHarris. Also check her website for more of her writings.
“Side A: Violent Femmes,” by Sabrina Hicks in Roi Fainéant Press. Find her on Twitter/X at @desertdwellera3 or at her website.
Another from Roi Fainéant Press: “Bon Appétit” by Grace Black. Her nom de Twitter/X is @graceblackink, and she too has a website.
A bit of punk noir from Casey Stegman (@cstegman on Twitter/X): “Watch It All Burn,” in Punk Noir Magazine. Read more of his stuff on his website.

Have a good weekend.

AI-generated image.

Recently published: ‘Hypnotist’ (short story)

A few months ago, I reviewed several old writings, short stories and essays I’d written in the late 1990s through early 2000s. I set aside several pieces I decided weren’t worthy of further work at this time, and focused on revising or rewriting a few that I thought might find a home in some literary journal. One of them is a 1,500-word short story called “Hypnotist.” I dusted it off, submitted it to five or six journals, and when a brand new student-run journal called Red String contacted me with a request to publish it, I happily and readily agreed. They published the story here a few weeks ago. I’m posting it below as well so that I have it in my archives and to correct the spelling of “Cobain,” which was misspelled in the published version.

Trigger warning: the story is rather dark. Proceed with caution.

Friday Five: literary Easter eggs

Some literary morsels to entertain, inform, and possibly inspire.

On this Good Friday, as we enter Easter weekend, here are five literary morsels — little Easter eggs I recently hunted down to pass along for your reading and listening pleasure. May they provide some amusement, entertainment, and even inspiration.

13 Ways of Looking at Socks is one poet’s “meditations on something so deeply mundane that we rarely think about it until we reach into the sock drawer and it’s empty or just sad and disappointing and now you have to do laundry.” The author, Mary Roblyn, wrote it as a riff on Wallace Stevens’ 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. In Roblyn’s case, she accompanies her writing with relevant photos.
“Good writers borrow, great writers steal.” We’ve all heard that old saying, right? Writer B.J. Novak (he of “The Office” fame) takes it literally in this short audio piece, which he and actor Aasif Mandvi read to open a recent episode of the podcast Selected Shorts (highly recommended for fans of short fiction). The story is from Novak’s book of short stories, One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories.
Vermilion Cliffs is a lovely piece of micro fiction by Allison Field Bell, published in Fractured Lit, the online literary journal devoted to flash and micro fiction.
“Far from this foreign Easter damp and chilly/My soul steals to a pear-shaped plot of ground,/Where gleamed the lilac-tinted Easter lily/Soft-scented in the air for yards around;” — begins Claude McKay’s poem/meditation “The Easter Flower.”
Here’s the pitch, baseball fans: Some of the greatest books about sports are also about so much more. Just in time for the opening of baseball season, Keith O’Brien, the author of a book about one of the game’s greatest tragic figures, Pete Rose, gives us Greek Tragedy in the Bottom of the Ninth: On Baseball’s High Literary Drama. Play ball!

Photo by Laurentiu Iordache on Unsplash