Sudden Fiction (Continued): 60 New Short-Short Stories

After reading the first story, I was hooked. I decided to read only one story a day to allow the beauty and subtle nature of the writing to soak into my heart and head. Some stories are better than others, but only a few have left me unmoved. The one I read today changed my life. I'm online to order a copy for a friend.

good condition and reasonably priced.

This book is filled with wonderful little flash stories--very inspiring, especially to those who aspire to writing flash fiction.

If you are serious about learning about the art of shorter forms of fiction and flash fiction this is a must buy.

Out of the 60 stories, I only enjoyed 4. It wasn't just that the stories weren't my type, it's also the way some of the stories were written. It just didn't work.

I had to read this book for a college course on fiction writing. I liked it. Not something I would have had the patience to read on my own, but good.

I liked Sudden Fiction Continued because it kept my interest. The stories come in many varities, from death to helping others.There's a lesson to be learned from all of the stories. One of my favorites was Videotape by Don Delillo, about a commercial on tv that shows a man driving down the road and is all of a sudden shot in the head by the Texas Highway Killer, which the author found to be alarming. I thought the author did a good job on keeping me glued to reading on and finishing the story. This book kind of reminds me of Chicken Soup for the Soul, but the stories are a lot shorter. Overall, it was touching, making you think twice about your actions.

When I bought this book and read it for the first time in 2005, I thought the stories were ok but not special, and I felt mildly disappointed. Twelve years later, I'm reading this book again, and this time I think these stories are superb. I admire and savour their quiet intensity.During my first read, I placed a dot behind the title of any story I particularly liked. It's interesting to compare my reading experience this time, because I would choose different stories now.What escaped me completely during my first read is the that the line-up of authors includes some literary greats, like Margaret Atwood, Alice Walker, Peter Meinke. Had I been aware of their star quality, would I have rated their stories differently the first time? I don't know.I still find some issues irritating the way I did during my first read: the gimmicks some writers resort to to make their stories stand out, e.g. changing the tense every couple of paragraphs, between Past Tense and Present Tense, without any contextual reason that I can discern. Also, some stories feel just shallow or sensationalistic to me.Yet others have a quiet power, some are entertaining,some open perspectives I'd never encountered before,and many show great originality of thought.The book contains 60 stories of under 2000 words in length which are described as 'short short stories'. I believe that nowadays, 'short short' usually denotes something shorter - definitions vary, but usually under 1000 words. Definitions don't bother me, I just want to point this out in case readers are looking specifically for under-1000 words stories.The paperback is of reasonable quality, well laid-out with headers and story titles, but something went wrong with the pagination. All page numbers appear on the bottom right of the page, instead of in the outer corners. This means the page numbers on left pages are close to the book's gutter, and can't be seen easily when looking for a page number. It's not a major problem, because the pagination on the right hand pages is correct. But this is something the publishers should have seen and corrected at the proof stage before the book went into print.The title "Sudden Fiction (Religion)" puzzles me, since these stories are not religious. One story alludes to the shroud of Turin, another mentions Buddhist funeral customs, but that's it. Since the bizarre title appears only in Amazon's product listing and not on or in the book itself. I guess that someone misread 'continued' and mistyped it as 'religion' - quite a big blunder, and one that should have been spotted and corrected. If you're specifically looking for religious stories, this book won't give you what you want.