Flash History: About Flash

It is the journal of the International Flash Fiction Association (IFFA).

Since the inaugural issue of October 2008, Flash has established itself as the world’s leading publisher of quality short-short stories and serious reviews of flash-fiction anthologies, collections, guidebooks, and critical studies. The journal Geist has described the magazine as ‘one of the best current venues’ for ‘high-quality’ flashes and the scholar Dr Michael A. Chaney (Dartmouth College, New Hampshire) rates it as one of the top ten literary magazines to send short-short stories.

Authors

To date, Flash has published writers from thirty-seven countries: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Botswana, Brazil, Britain, Canada, China, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Ghana, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Lebanon, Malaysia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, the Philippines, Portugal, Serbia, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, and the USA. A number of stories have been published in translation, from Arabic, Chinese, German, Hebrew, Serbian, and Spanish.

Booker and Pulitzer Prize winners and nominees published in Flash include Margaret Atwood, Beryl Bainbridge, Robert Olen Butler, Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, James Kelman, Bernard MacLaverty, Jon McGregor, Matt Thorne, and William Wall. Other critically acclaimed authors include Ama Ata Aidoo, Roberta Allen, Elleke Boehmer, Mark Budman, Mitch Cullin, David Gaffney, Vanessa Gebbie, Michael Cawood Green, Niall Griffiths, Tania Hershman, Allan Kolski Horwitz, Etgar Keret, Shubnum Khan, J. Robert Lennon, Ewan Morrison, Sally-Ann Murray, Craig Raine, Ian Rankin, Robert Scotellaro, Ana María Shua, and Josef Winkler.

'Flash Presents', 'Flash Reviews’, and ‘Flash Essays’

The ‘Flash Presents’ section of each issue is an opportunity for the editors to reprint flashes from anthologies and collections that they particularly admire. The purpose is to introduce our readers to quality books and writers they may not otherwise have discovered. Authors presented include Robert Olen Butler, Stuart Dybek, Dave Eggers, Sherrie Flick, Allan Kolski Horwitz, Liesl Jobson, Etgar Keret, J. Robert Lennon, Sarah Manguso, Kobus Moolman, Pamela Painter, Dan Rhodes, Zhou Rui, Ana María Shua, Kelwyn Sole, Xi Xi, and Barry Yourgrau.

Another important feature of the magazine is its ‘Flash Reviews’ section, which carries reviews, by academics and authors from Britain and beyond, of short-short story anthologies, collections, guidebooks, and critical studies. These include significant new books by Lydia Davis (winner of the 2013 Man Booker International Prize), Tania Hershman, David Gaffney, Vanessa Gebbie, Etgar Keret, Tara L. Masih (ed.), Jon McGregor, Dinty W. Moore (ed.), Ewan Morrison, Shouhua Qi (ed.), Dan Rhodes, Robert Shapard and James Thomas (eds), Ana María Shua, and Craig Taylor.

A ‘Flash Essays’ section was added to the magazine in October 2012. Published and forthcoming essays focus on Jayne Anne Phillips, flash memoir, and Samuel Beckett.

Complete Bibliography

For a downloadable bibliography covering every issue of Flash, click on one of the links below

Bibliography_11.1.pdf

Flash at the University of Chester: Teaching, Special Collection Archive

In the Department of English at the University of Chester, Flash is a set text on several undergraduate courses and on the MA Creative Writing and MA Modern and Contemporary Fiction. David Gaffney, a contributor to an issue students study, has been a guest speaker on two of the modules, ‘Varieties of Writing’ (for undergraduates) and ‘Writing Prose Fiction’ (for postgraduates). Chester’s students read their flashes at the Department’s open-mic nights and contribute them to Flash, the University’s e-zine Pandora’s Inbox, and its sister publication Pandora’s Box.

Founded and overseen by Peter and Ashley, the Flash Fiction Special Collection (Seaborne Library, University of Chester) is the world’s largest archive of short-short-story anthologies, collections, magazines, and secondary texts. This invaluable (and ever-growing) resource for students and researchers comprises current and back issues of nine periodicals and well over two hundred other works, including several rare books published in the USA in the 1940s and 1950s.

Peter and Ashley also maintain a Flash archive that is fast becoming a rich resource for future researchers. It includes the unedited versions of published stories, as well as correspondence with authors (including those named above), literary agents and publishers, plus other items of interest (such as signed books, and postcards from Alan Bennett and Sebastian Horsley).