Issue 7.2 of Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine is now available.

It features new stories from Australia, Austria, Britain, Canada, China, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, and the USA. We are particularly pleased to open with pieces by two distinguished European writers, in luminous translations: two ‘zkv’s (‘zeer korte verhalen’ [very short stories]) by A. L. Snijders, who coined the term, translated from the Dutch by Man Booker International winner Lydia Davis; and three pieces from Austrian writer Josef Winkler’s When the Time Comes (2013), translated by Adrian West, originally published in German as Wenn es soweit ist – Erzählung (1998). Wonderful renderings by West of Winkler also appeared in Flash, 6.1. Davis’s impressive Collected Stories (2009) was featured in the ‘Flash Presents’ section of 6.2; her latest collection, Can’t and Won’t, is enthusiastically reviewed in this issue by Robert Shapard, editor of influential flash and sudden-fiction anthologies.

This issue’s ‘Flash Presents’ contains four stories by Virginia Woolf: ‘A Haunted House’, ‘Monday or Tuesday’, ‘Blue & Green’, and ‘In the Orchard’. These are followed by our fourth ‘Flash Essay’. In ‘“Splinters & mosaics”: Virginia Woolf’s Flash Fictions’, Kathryn Simpson argues that Woolf’s experimental flashes provide insight into her emergence as a major modernist novelist and her enduring preoccupations.

‘Flash Reviews’ examines two other single-author books and two anthologies. Laurie Champion is entertained by Lucy Corin’s One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses, a collection of short and short-short stories, while Christine Simon is intrigued by Will Eaves’s The Absent Therapist, a novel in flashes. Robert Scotellaro enjoys Tara Laskowski’s selection from ten years of the SmokeLong Quarterly, while Ian Seed embraces the longer perspective of Alan Ziegler’s Short, which ranges over five centuries of brief prose. Each review is accompanied by a sample story. Laskowski’s anthology is represented by Jeff Landon’s ‘Five Fat Men in a Hot Tub’, Ziegler’s by Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Artist’.

To order a copy of the issue, or to subscribe to the magazine, go to: http://www.chester.ac.uk/flash.magazine

Peter Blair and Ashley Chantler (Editors)