Writer and editor Robert Shapard is one of the country’s foremost experts on very short fiction. In the last twenty years, he has edited and co-edited three anthologies of work in the genre. W.W. Norton will soon be publishing two more: Flash Fiction Forward and an all-new Sudden Fiction.
He has published stories in the Literary Review, the Kenyon Review, and Cosmopolitan, and his current short-short, “Bare Ana,” is available online at Juked.
vice-versa caught up with Robert at the Manoa Starbucks, a place where he can often be found writing and editing.
vv Tell us a little about this thing called “sudden” fiction.
rs Sudden fiction’s just short-short fiction, and we just saw more of it being published in literary magazines, James Thomas and I. We were curious. What is it? That’s what we were asking, because it seemed to be all kinds of things. Fiction in the form of a traditional story or fable. Or backwards stories or grocery lists...all kinds of crazy stuff we were not seeing in print just a few years before.