Let’s press ahead a little further by sketching out a few variations among short shorts:ONE THRUST OF INCIDENT. (Examples: Paz, Mishima, Shalamov, Babel, W. C. Williams.) In these short shorts the time span is extremely...

Yes, strip. Take off all of your clothes. I want to see you naked. Now please.”I feel dazed, yet I let my jacket fall to the floor, and start work on my shirt buttons. Your...

All that sweetness makes me feel weird. My sister was never the loving type.

I’d always hated cocktail parties. And this one was worse than most. Overdressed pseudo–people smiled plastic smiles, told one–upmanship stories with phony self–deprecation, then half–listened with painted–on sincerity to the one–upmanship rebuttals. Mannequins. Robots. Androids....

I’ve been asking you to marry me since we met! What more do you want?

With more time spent in their mother’s presence, Maggie kept topics of conversation to small stuff, seldom ever wanted to dig below the surface, learned from her mother: just be polite, which makes Callie’s own...

Remember this above all else: Never, ever appear like you once were, not to anyone.You have entered a new phase, but you must forgive yourself to enter. And you have to remember new lessons of...

I held Angie Luna in that room for hours, and I remember the different times we made love like epochs in a civilization, each movement and every touch, apex upon abyss. In the luxury of...

If the world explore all my dark fantasy, will change for the better”.

The Grim Reaper isn’t grim at all; he’s a life-saver. He isn’t grim because he isn’t anything. . . . he is nothing. And nothing is a hell of a lot better than anything. So...

I like to see you in a sari, with your long hair dressed in a single plait. Don’t forget that I married a girl from India because I like my wife to be conservative and...

The wheel turns for all, caro Chase. It’s the karma effect,” Giulia cried, aping Ilenia. She could have never imagined that her words would become prophetic so soon.

The usual short story cannot have a complex plot, but it often has a simple one resembling a chain with two or three links. The short short, however, doesn’t as a rule have even that...

I am a dash man and not a miler, and it is probable that I will never write a novel. So far the novels of this war have had too much of the strength, maturity...

A shrink and a patient in a love-hate relationship. Who is REALLY the boss?

If freedom is free and none need worry, then what blood drops for thee?

I imagine I should have told it to you before? I love you, Sejal.I wish for you to become my wife.Recently I’ve also opened a shop in North Dakota and thinking that, just maybe, you...

A short story is a sprint, a novel is a marathon. Sprinters have seconds to get from here to there and then they are finished. Marathoners have to carefully pace themselves so that they don’t...

The day the earth-moving machines arrived, it was as if aliens had invaded Earth. Overnight they appeared, diggers with huge scoops, plodding their slow and ancient ways across the landscape. By the next week they...

I hated seeing these spasmodic upside-down chicken heads stretching to puncture my flesh. I imagined once that they reached my groin and pecked out my penis and my huevos and kept pecking until they got...

FUTURE GONE”: “…I wonder what actually this hospital is, why I am in it and who I am. I have no time to find out. I die, with my arms stretched towards the spotlights.Then whiteness.My...

You can take the barbarian out of the tavern, but he can take the blood out of your body.

El cuento requiere una reducción del campo narrativo análoga al estrechamiento de conciencia que acompaña a las ideas fijas. En cierto modo, el cuentista procede como un obseso.

It was Chase who had obtained the information from the girl’s boyfriend during a party in an Irish pub, simply by using his British friendliness and charm.

There can’t be much development of action or theme in such stories, but at least there is some. By contrast, in the short short the very idea of character seems to lose its significance, seems...

My short stories are like soft shadows I have set out in the world, faint footprints I have left. I remember exactly where I set down each and every one of them, and how I...

You are in love with my husband. You need some acting lessons to learn to hide it better.

It’s best to watch out for men, like me.

Thank you father, thank you. I know you watched me from above and protected me. I promise I shall serve the Magnarian Confederation with all my body and soul. I shall dedicate myself fully to...

You know, the world is all about balance. You lose something here… maybe somebody else picks it up over there.

Just tell yourself they’re only stories. Pamela K. Kinney (Spectre Nightmares and Visitations)

For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier...

The only one everlasting love is the unrealized one. The love to this thing that you’d never had. Behind it is hidden the love to your own ego and feelings”.

A novel is just a story that hasn’t yet discovered a way to be brief.

I am thinking of killing myself”” Hmm…okay

Mr Benz, the parapet of an Italian bridge doesn’t look like the proper place for you,” said Chase.

What we are about to have here is a holy water smack down!

A short story I have written long ago would barge into my house in the middle of the night, shake me awake and shout, ‘Hey,this is no time for sleeping! You can’t forget me, there’s...

One day or one night—between my days and nights, what difference can there be?—I dreamed that there was a grain of sand on the floor of my cell. Unconcerned, I went back to sleep; I...

my new website is now live on There are free short stories to download on it. Have fun!

Though this child came in with nothing but excess baby fat, chemical brain waves, and mother and son bodily toxins on his legs, he had a fate fit for a modern day demigod.

Are you on crack? Or did I take a righteous bong hit before coming here?

You can’t kill an idea the way they try to. You can keep it down awhile, but sooner or later it’ll come out. Now what you’ve got to understand is that the wheel’s not evil....

You create your own reality.

…I set the house on fire. It’s dark outside. The fire tears down the darkness. I turn my back to the place and leave, not knowing where. And suddenly I understand…All dreams are dead now”.

Fiction has been maligned for centuries as being “false,” “untrue,” yet good fiction provides more truth about the world, about life, and even about the reader, than can be found in non-fiction.

You need to take some acting classes to learn to hide your huge crush on my husband better

Becky was a weed. Nobody ever wanted them taking over the bigger, prettier plants. People went to all extremes to make them go away. They sprayed poison, pulled until the roots gave way. They felt...

So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence.

Remove the computer chipslodged in your brain before they convince youthat you’ve gone insane…Take a bite out of realityinstead of becominga reality byte.