Flash: The International Short-Short Story Press

Gillian Walker’s chapbook The World at the End of the Garden: A Novella-in-Flash, edited by Peter Blair and Ashley Chantler (2020)

An English textile artist accompanies her husband to live in Tucson, Arizona for a year. Her world shrinks to a gated community of strangers and the view of the arroyo at the bottom of the garden. Escaping from a regime of fertility treatments and miscarriages, she learns to tolerate the heat and the snakes. With the help of Samuel, a mysterious boy who lives across the arroyo, she explores the landscape, learns its history and falls in love with Tucson’s flowers and seasonal rains. As the year passes, she finds a new direction for her art and life.

The World at the End of the Garden is a novella-in-flash about the discovery of self, the meaning of home, and the place of humans on the planet.

‘Gillian Walker’s expertly-woven narrative on loss, the struggle for control, and the body is deeply affecting and brilliantly crafted. You’ll be immersed entirely in this intricate debut.’
Kit Frick, author of A Small Rising Up in the Lungs and I Killed Zoe Spanos.

‘A mesmerising novella that expertly uses metaphor to show how the natural world and human life interweave. A poignant and timely read about loss and survival in harsh circumstances.’
Jude Higgins, author of The Chemist’s House; director of Flash Fiction Festival (UK).

‘I read this novella-in-flash in one sitting, marvelling at the richness of texture and gripped by its unfolding sense of pattern. Walker reinvigorates an archetypal narrative: the individual tested in an unfamiliar, unsettling environment. Relocated from her Yorkshire home, the narrator faces a world fraught with threat and the risk of disintegration.’
Michael Loveday, author of Three Men on the Edge.

A list of content is available online.

To order a copy please see our website.

A 25% discount is available to members of the International Flash Fiction Association.

Gillian Walker is a writer based in the UK. One of her first publications was in Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, 9.2 (Oct. 2016). Subsequent flashes and short stories have appeared in Popshot Quarterly, Ambit, Into the Void, and Jellyfish Review. She was shortlisted for the Cambridge Short Story Prize, 2020. The World at the End of the Garden was a finalist in The Black River Chapbook Competition run by Black Lawrence Press in the USA. She is a member of the editorial team at Retreat West.

Vanessa Gebbie, Nothing to Worry About: Flash Fictions, edited by Peter Blair and Ashley Chantler (2018)

Welcome to the strange, fertile world of Vanessa Gebbie’s imagination in this collection of irreal flash fictions, in which little makes sense and yet everything does. A sea lion learns to fly. A man wakes to find his head is triangular. Babies talk. Sextants grow inside a man’s chest. Bella’s iron tablets work rather too well. And Daphne grows bonsai in a plethora of odd places. After all, the world keeps turning, and people occasionally do strange things – but then, that’s life, and life is nothing to worry about … Or is it?

‘How do you make the ordinary surreal and the surreal ordinary in fiction? Vanessa Gebbie manages this brilliantly in her new collection of darkly comic and often poignant flash fictions.’
Jude Higgins, author of The Chemist’s House; director of Flash Fiction Festival (UK).

‘These beautifully crafted flash fictions shine a light on the mundane and the outlandish. Nothing to Worry About is a magnificent collection: odd, unsettling, captivating.’
Gary Duncan, author of You’re Not Supposed Cry.

‘Vanessa Gebbie has a gift for comedy and vivid expression, yet she’s also a conjuror, unsettling us with strange transformations. These stories range from domestic surrealism to menacing dystopian fantasy to enigmatic narratives, full of suggestion. Magical stuff.’
Michael Loveday, author of Three Men on the Edge.

‘Vanessa Gebbie’s flash fictions are by turns funny, elliptical and poignant. Here, the ordinary is odd, and the extraordinary believable: people alter their homes and un-alter them when the changes are unsettling; a memory archaeologist meets a man who oozes kindness; a drowned corpse is claimed by many but no one is actually sure who it belongs to; a dismembered wife may not want to be reassembled. Gebbie is a prodigiously gifted writer.’
Nuala O’Connor, author of Joyride to Jupiter, Of Dublin and Other Fictions, Mother America, and Nude.

A list of contents is available online.

To order a copy please see our website.

A 25% discount is available to members of the International Flash Fiction Association.

Vanessa Gebbie is a writer of stories from 10 to 100,000 words. She is author of the short-fiction collections Words from a Glass Bubble (2008), Storm Warning: Echoes of Conflict (2010), A Short History of Synchronised Breathing and Other Stories (2017), and Ed’s Wife and Other Creatures (with illustrations by Lynn Roberts; 2015). Also the novel The Coward’s Tale (2011) and the poetry collections The Half-Life of Fathers (2013) and Memorandum: Poems for the Fallen (2016). She is editor of the textbook Short Circuit: A Guide to the Art of the Short Story (2009/2013), which includes craft chapters by 26 acclaimed writers of the genre.

Vanessa has taught for the Arvon Foundation, New Writing South, The Arts Council, London’s Spread the Word and The Word Factory, Nottingham Writers’ Studio, Vienna Writers’ Studio, and Creative Retreats in Venice, as well as at literary festivals, schools, and universities. She frequently mentors other writers.

Her work has been supported by an Arts Council Grant for the Arts, by residencies at Gladstone’s Library in the UK and Anam Cara Writers and Artists’ Retreat in Ireland, and by a Hawthornden Fellowship.

David Steward, Travelling Solo: Flash Fictions, edited by Peter Blair and Ashley Chantler (2018)

In an East Anglian seaside town, a woman recognises her lost son at a supermarket checkout. Outside on the marine parade, a van driver dreams of rescuing a young woman from the seedy tourist trade. Meanwhile, a few miles away, a redundant City banker has retreated to the coast in an effort to reinvent himself.

In these thirty flash fictions, paths cross, people meet and part, and always there are consequences, often misremembered or misunderstood. Funny, caustic and poignant by turns, the stories remind us that we each find our own way through the muddle of life.

‘Meaning glints provocatively in these stories. There’s something underneath. They let us imagine the basements and hidden floors.’
Adam Thorpe, author of Ulverton, Hodd, Missing Fay, Shifts, and Is This the Way You Said?

‘Frinton, Yarmouth, Brimsdown … Travelling Solo is a whistle-stop tour of some of England’s sexiest towns! It’s also a collection of some of the sharpest and funniest flash fiction I have ever read. Which is sexy, too.
Jonathan Cardew, fiction editor, Connotation Press.

‘With these well-crafted stories, David Steward proves himself to be an insightful spokesperson for the human condition.’
Meg Pokrass, author of Damn Sure Right, Bird Envy, The Dog Looks Happy Upside Down, and Alligators At Night.

‘David Steward’s flash fictions deal with the importance of moments. He gives us fragments of lives lived, or never lived, and shows the way that those moments – full of hopes and hates – slip away so easily. He captures the random and unfathomable nature of life’s minutiae, and feeds it back to us in captivating tales that light the mundane to look like the extraordinary.’
Calum Kerr, author of Braking Distance, Lost Property, and The World in a Flash: How to Write Flash-Fiction; founder and director of Gumbo Press and National Flash-Fiction Day (UK).

‘David Steward’s stories trace the moments, sometimes of revelation and sometimes of bafflement, that punctuate our lives. They are about people, usually men, travelling solo through the indignities of work and life: commuting, clubbing, living in hotel rooms, trying not to look at women’s breasts. The result is a funny but melancholy book, crisp and consoling, about how people do go on, basically alone, taking comfort in human contacts that can be as small as business cards.’
Tony Williams, author of The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street, All the Rooms of Uncle’s Head, and All the Bananas I’ve Never Eaten.

A list of contents is available online.

To order a copy please see our website.

A 25% discount is available to members of the International Flash Fiction Association.

David Steward is a regular contributor to Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine. He has had longer stories published in, among others, Under the Radar. His flash ‘The Edge of the Woods’ appeared in the winners’ anthology of the Bridport Prize 2013. David has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize in four other years since 2012, four times for Flash Fiction and once in the Short Story category.

His story ‘The Cutty Wren’ was read at the Solstice Shorts Festival 2016 and is in the Shortest Day, Longest Night Anthology, published by Arachne Press. ‘Twenty-Five Seconds’ is in the National Flash-Fiction Day anthology for 2017, Sleep Is a Beautiful Colour.

An East Anglian by birth and choice, David lives in Norfolk.

Short on Sugar, High on Honey: Micro Love Stories, edited by Mark Budman and Tom Hazuka (2018)

• 300 little love stories
• 7–13 words
• 101 pocket-sized pages

An exciting new anthology of micro fiction by over 200 authors from around the world.

The authors include: Paul Beckman, Stuart Dybek, Carrie Etter, Sherrie Flick, Avital Gad-Cykman, Tara Lynn Masih, Lynn Mundell, Jonathan Pinnock, Pedro Ponce, Santino Prinzi, Sally Reno, Bruce Holland Rogers, Ravi Shankar, Laura Tansley, Meg Tuite, Deb Olin Unferth, Diane Williams … and many more.

Sample stories:

He lowered his pants. She gasped. He’d misspelled her name. It was permanent. [M. E. Parker]

Callie accepted Trey’s ring, then texted Dave to meet her at the pawnshop. [Joanne Fairies]

Clothes make the man – but you gotta remove them to make the baby. [Lizzi Wolf]

In the kitchen is a picture of a family that almost never happened. [Joseph S. Peters]

As a faithful wife, I faced no remorse. Only regrets. [Nathalie Boisard-Beudin]

Forty years. Lovers always. Married. Finally husbands. [Paul Fahey]

I pull petals from daisies you push up. They answer always: loved me. [Denise R. Graham]

‘If William Blake could see a world in a grain of sand, what might he see in a micro love story? My favorite is by Pedro Ponce: “There was a boy who loved a girl. Such stories rarely end well.” These micros challenge the reader to imagine the agony and ecstasy of whole lives in about a dozen words. Are you up to it? Buy this book and see.’
Robert Shapard, author of Motel and Other Stories; co-editor of Sudden Fiction International: 60 Short-Short Stories, Sudden Fiction Latino: Short-Short Stories from the United States and Latin America.

‘Sure, a picture can be worth a thousand words, but what is the worth of seven to thirteen words? In Short on Sugar, High on Honey, some sentences are worth an entire plot, particularly the mini-tales of such authors as Beverly Jackson, Julianna Baggott, Stuart Dybek, Paul Lorello, Lauren Becker, Nancy Castaneda, John Briggs, Lisa Rowe Fraustino, and Joanne Faries. Other one-liners work as prompts for story ideas: How might you start a novel with this situation? What would happen next if a character said this? Either way, this anthology opens the door into the imagination of what could be – both on the page and in our lives.’
Marjorie Maddox, author of What She Was Saying, True, False, None of the Above, Local News from Someplace Else.

‘Love is where you find it. Until you lose it. These brief encounters swing both ways, here today, gone tomorrow, but always with instant recognition. You’ve been there. Now here you are again. With its truth burned into your memory.’
James Thomas, co-editor of Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories, Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories, Flash Fiction International: Very Short Stories from Around the World.

‘Imagine all your smartest, wittiest friends volleying words around a table, discussing love and all its failings and imperfect beauty. That is this book. By turns tender and arch, full of humor, candor, and wickedly deft insights, Short on Sugar, High on Honey is a delightful, entertaining read featuring some of the best writers working today.’
Kathy Fish, author of Wild Life: A Collection of Undomesticated Flash Fictions and Together We Can Bury It; co-author of Rift.

Out of Print

Funny Bone: Flashing for Comic Relief, edited by Peter Blair and Ashley Chantler (2017)

• 60 authors
• 60 stories
• No more than 360 words
• Profits to Comic Relief

Wry, off-beat, quirky, naughty, witty, absurd, dark, droll, deadpan, dry.
Comedies of errors, manners, embarrassments.
Repartee, satire, slapstick, farce.
And, oh yes, clowns.

Funny Bone is an exciting new anthology of sixty flashes by sixty of the world's leading flashers. It is edited by Peter Blair and Ashley Chantler.

Profits go to Comic Relief, a major charity based in the UK, with a vision of a just world, free from poverty.

The sixty authors are: Steve Almond, Alan Beard, Paul Blaney, Randall Brown, Mark Budman, Jonathan Cardew, Peter Cherches, Kim Chinquee, Sarah-Clare Conlon, Steve Cushman, Jon Davis, Lydia Davis, Wayne Dean-Richards, Roddy Doyle, Grant Faulkner, Avital Gad-Cykman, David Gaffney, Vanessa Gebbie, Ihab Hassan, Tom Hazuka, Kyle Hemmings, Tania Hershman, David Higgins, Allan Kolski Horwitz, Holly Howitt, Paul Kavanagh, Calum Kerr, Steve Kissing, Tara Laskowski, Michael Loveday, Sean Lovelace, Bernard MacLaverty, Paul McDonald, Kobus Moolman, Sally-Ann Murray, Nuala O’Connor, Pamela Painter, Nick Parker, Nik Perring, Jonathan Pinnock, Meg Pokrass, Pedro Ponce, Bruce Holland Rogers, Ethel Rohan, Katey Schultz, Robert Scotellaro, Ian Seed, Gemma Seltzer, Ana María Shua, Christine Simon, David Steward, Nancy Stohlman, David Swann, Matt Thorne, Kevin Tosca, Meg Tuite, Emily Vanderploeg, Gee Williams, Jeremy Worman, Shellie Zacharia.

A contents list is available online.       

Out of Print

Meg Tuite, Lined Up Like Scars: Flash Fictions, edited by Peter Blair and Ashley Chantler (2015)

‘The inner ear is called the labyrinth because of its chronic orbit, like childhood. I listen to myself drown in the punctuality of balanced meals and walking on tiptoes. Madness is as close as Mom’s floral upholstery, close as the strain of devouring myself piece by piece'.

David Swann, Stronger Faster Shorter: Flash Fictions, edited by Peter Blair and Ashley Chantler (2015)

A cricket team’s youthful scorer has ‘lovely white knees’ and ‘delicate’ ears, but something inside him is wrong. A lad called Dewhurst likes to ‘bow down before the cows’. Frank has become allergic to his pigeons. At a university open day, a prospective student plays toilet tennis. A cub reporter for a local newspaper meets Cheese Horn and Wolftoucher at a CB Radio gathering. On a bus, there’s Sean, who has a mysterious ‘island-chain of burns stretching over face, scalp and neck’.

Swann’s flashes are humorous, tender, and profound. One of his characters would say that the collection is ‘pearling’ and ‘ace’.

‘An essential flash-fiction collection, David Swann’s Stronger Faster Shorter absorbs the dialects, drama and delirium of the real world, but with a taste for the strange, the absurd, and the poetic.’
Holly Howitt, author of Dinner Time, co-editor of Exposure and Other Microfictions and Prose Poems.

‘What a treat it was to find SO many engaging short-short stories gathered together in a single collection. David Swann is a writer who understands life and portrays it in a nuanced way. I was taken at how he has infused his characters and scenarios, within the confines of such tiny spaces, with such depth and compelling moments. I highly recommend Stronger Faster Shorter.’
Robert Scotellaro, author of Measuring the Distance and What We Know So Far: Micro Fiction.

‘David Swann’s flash fictions are marvellous – original, varied, surprising, perfect. If anyone is interested to learn about the form, they could do a lot worse than get hold of this little chapbook and devour it!’
Vanessa Gebbie, author of Words from a Glass Bubble, Storm Warning: Echoes of Conflict, and Ed’s Wife and Other Creatures, editor of Short Circuit: A Guide to the Art of the Short Story.

A list of contents is available online.       

To order a copy please see our website. 

A 25% discount is available to members of the International Flash Fiction Association.           

David Swann was born four doors up the street from the novelist Jeanette Winterson, who scared him stiff with spooky stories. Later, he was given the even more frightening task of reporting on Accrington Stanley’s football matches for the local newspaper. After a three-year stint as a journalist in the Netherlands, he returned to England to take an MA in Creative Writing at Lancaster University, which he passed with Distinction. From 1996 to 1997, he was Writer in Residence at H.M.P. Nottingham Prison. A book based on his experiences in the jail, The Privilege of Rain (Waterloo Press, 2010), was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry.

He is currently Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Chichester, where he teaches modules on fiction, poetry, and screenwriting. Swann’s short stories and poems have been widely published and won many awards, including six successes at the Bridport Prize and two in the National Poetry Competition. His debut short-story collection, The Last Days of Johnny North, was published by Elastic Press in 2006. In 2013, Swann served as judge for the Bridport Prize’s international flash-fiction competition.

Read Sean Lovelace’s review in Diagram, 15.4 (30 Aug. 2015).

Read Jeanette Sheppard’s review for the Bath Flash Fiction Award (1 Aug. 2016).

Read David Frankel’s ‘An Interview with David Swann’ in Thresholds (5 Oct. 2015).