Edited by David L. Ulin
American Flash Fiction: An Anthology
(Library of America, September 2026)
The biggest and best collection of American flash fiction ever assembled reveals the very big imaginative possibilities of very short stories
Featuring 100 genre-spanning and form-bending stories, spanning 160+years; includes literary fiction, speculative fiction, noir, satire, surrealism, humor, horror, parables, fables, and more.
This landmark Library of America anthology presents the best of a century and a half of American storytelling and literary innovationâin 100 bite-sized pieces, from 100 wildly diverse and distinguished authors.
Celebrating the artful brevities of flash fiction from Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, and Zora Neale Hurston to Donald Barthelme, Lydia Davis, and Diane Williams, it recovers some of the little-understood history of the very short story before âflash fictionâ was invented, and it gathers the brilliant work of a score of emerging contemporary writers, too. Here are:
- Winners of the Nobel Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Award (Ernest Hemingway, William Carlos Williams, John Steinbeck, Alice Walker, Tim OâBrien)
- Hard-boiled crime writers (Dashiell Hammett, David Goodis)
- Speculative fiction writers (H.P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Damon Knight, Sofia Samatar)
- Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (Jean Toomer, Wallace Thurman, Dorothy West, Langston Hughes)
- Surrealists; prose poets; memoirists; experimental writers; and many more, all of them with stories that reveal worlds and startle the imagination in the space of a few pages.
Introduced by acclaimed writer, critic, and anthologist David L. Ulin, who explores the origins and creative range of the form, the collection also includes notes on the stories and contributors, and an index.
David L. Ulin is the author or editor of eight previous books, including Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time, and the Library of Americaâs Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a California Book Award. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, he is book critic, and former book editor, of the Los Angeles Times.