“Get in, get out. Don’t linger. Go on.” ―
Robert Scotellaro is the author of over twenty books and chapbooks.
Below are his most recent collections of flash fiction.
(Cervena Barva Press, 2026)
“In The Weight of Certain Moments, Robert Scotellaro once again displays his mastery of the prose poem/micro-story. There’s a brilliantly ironic imagination at play in these pieces, in which a man working at a sky factory attempts to fit celestial bodies into bottles; a father shoots at his son with a gun that fires the American flag; a teenager experiences the consequences of The Bikini Wars, and skydiving honeymooners confess wind-altered secrets. Scotellaro dazzles with his ability to create worlds in a few sentences. Each moment in this book of weighted moments brings us face to face with our human frailties and foibles, but the saving grace is always our stories and our poetry. Scotellaro hits the mark again and again. This book is deeply moving and funny as hell!”
—Jeff Friedman, author of Ashes in Paradise and The Marksman
“The Weight of Certain Moments reminds us that Robert Scotellaro is an absolute master of the narrative prose poem. Eighty-five times, he creates a distinctive voice with odd, but somehow necessary details. Eighty-five times, he manages to surprise. The eccentricity of the speakers and their tales is so cleverly created that the fantastic feels normal. I enjoyed this from beginning to end.”
—Gary Fincke, author of The Corridors of Longing and The History of the Baker’s Dozen
“Every prose poem in The Weight of Certain Moments by Robert Scotellaro opens the door to an original, amazing world: a mother practicing archery in the kitchen, featherless chickens in a hurricane sky, mimes ranting on the street, a salesman selling mistakes door to door… In this extraordinary collection, each poem brings us to pinpoint moments of absolute clarity, evoking epiphanies of wisdom, pain, humor, and understanding. With masterful strokes, Scotellaro’s work beckons us to see, feel, and become part of the moment ourselves. These prose poem gems are wonders to behold and be astonished by.”
—Guy Biederman, author of Here’s Where We Get Off and Edible Grace
“The Weight of Certain Moments is yet another brilliant volume of small resonating tales from a gifted master. Robert Scotellaro’s compassion for his subjects reveals the depth of his understanding and sympathy for what we all experience and feel as we step tentatively through the challenges of being mere mortals in a world which all too often presses in on us. The poetic gems within these covers attests to his keen insights into the foibles and triumphs we all traverse. This recent collection marks another milestone in Scotellaro’s long career as a singular and innovative creative force.”
—Michael C. Keith, author of Sunglasses in a Dark Room and Bodies in Recline
(Bamboo Dart Press, 2025)
“The spirit of my father was trapped inside my ballpoint pen,” Robert Scotellaro starts one of his truly delightful new stories. “Must have slipped in when I was changing the refill.” Hilarious, inventive, audacious, Scotellaro’s quick fictions pack a real punch, whether they involve a Peruvian language based on the word “llama,” or a guy in a Fat Elvis band being dumped by his girlfriend for somebody in a Skinny Johnny Cash band. And that father whose spirit is trapped in a fountain pen? Surely not the same father whose wife takes his temper in for an ultrasound, dragging their son along. Robert Scotellaro’s wit and creativity are all over the thirty-two gems that make up From the Book of Atmospheres.
—Charles Rammelkamp, author of Presto and The Trapeze of Your Flesh
There is an ethereal, almost otherworldly, quality about Scotellaro’s surreal collection of micro stories. One story is a tale about a woman whose husband is possessed by a “cliché demon” and speaks only in timeworn platitudes. Yet another, a political parable of our time, rues the day when the meek finally do inherit the earth and vengefully vent their long-simmering resentments. Throughout this fabulous book, Scotellaro illuminates the odd and the mysterious by deftly plumbing, in ever-so-brief fictions, the atmospheres that envelop the incongruous and offbeat dimensions of the real. From the Book of Atmospheres is a masterwork.
—Brad Rose, author of Lucky Animals and I Wouldn’t Say That, Exactly
Breath and Shadow: Six-Sentence Stories
With Meg Pokrass
(MadHat Press, 2024)
“Reading these two major talents of flash is akin to watching trapeze artists swoop and dive, yet retrieve their balance when you least expect it. Daring, witty and often surreal they carry the work into places they make clearly their own. Brilliant!”
—Frankie McMillan, author of My Mother and the Hungarians and The Father of Octopus Wrestling
“What happens when two flash fiction masters team up in alternating sections of six-sentence stories to prove that limits of form can expand imagination? A duel, a duet, a dance. Sheer magic!”
—Jane Ciabattari (Literary Hub columnist, contributor, BBC Culture)
“These six-sentence fictions in Breath and Shadow are a fresh mix of narratives that alternately startle, tickle, and sting. There’s gold in this stream of tiny stories, enough solid value to keep one pondering their richness while marveling at the sparkle.”
—Bob Thurber, author of Paperboy and Nothing But Trouble
“Scotellaro and Pokrass are the Penn and Teller of flash fiction, conjuring characters and situations and feelings for our amazement and amusement. Pure delight!”
—Lou Beach, author of 420 Characters and Cut It Out
Quick Adjustments
(Blue Light Press, 2023)
“To read Robert Scotellaro’s microfictions is to continually have a smile on your face, marveling at his humor, his wit, his inventiveness with language and story. These quick hits slap you awake with their high-wire cleverness – the hitman who spends his evenings reading to the blind, the nun with the prison tattoo, the man who visits his ex-wife in a lion’s cage, the sewer worker who reinvents his life, the “dudes” in the House of Pancakes discussing infinity, high on LSD. Sheer delight!”
—Charles Rammelkamp, author of A Magician Among the Spirits and Presto
“Quick Adjustments, Robert Scotellaro’s luminous new collection of micro-stories, demonstrates the author’s unparalleled gifts for fine-grained detail and razor-sharp comedic irony, the quintessential features of the finest compressed narrative literature. In richly concise stories that range from the confessions of a failed, self-doubting fire-walker, to the fractured legerdemain of a would-be magician who sports a purloined cape and monocle, the vivid narratives in this masterful collection – sometimes bawdy, sometimes melancholy – remind us that the transcendent is often based in the commonplace and that the saddest tales of human frailty are frequently also the most comedic.”
—Brad Rose, author of Lucky Animals and No. Wait. I Can Explain.
God in a Can
(Bamboo Dart Press, 2022)
“God in a Can is a sharp, unpredictable story collection full of humor, absurdity, and colorful characters who remain doggedly hopeful for better times. Here gods and humans share center stage: Hell stops in at a roadside diner, a man grows a colossal flare of peacock feathers, sumo wrestlers offer a personalized heating service, couples outwit the schadenfreude police, cope with new body parts, and keep love alive in a world that has been tilted askew. With a poet’s eye, Scotellaro hones in on vivid details and those small, sudden moments of elation.”
—Frankie McMillian, author of The Father of Octopus Wrestling and My Mother and the Hungarians
“In Robert Scotellaro’s new collection, God in a Can, each brilliant flash/micro story is a “metaphor of the powder fine substance of the world” (Italo Calvino): A mime with a gun breaks into the home of a couple and plays charades with them; a waitress encounters Hell at one of her booths and serves it “scrams and extra crispy browns with a bucket of vice on the side”; in the title piece, with one spray of “God in the Can,” a man can restore his old cat’s youth and even make his ex-wife desire him, at least for a moment. Cloud walkers, wolves juggling beer bottles, extravagant poets who are also kidnappers—God in a Can unveils not only the absurdity, comedy and sadness of our lives but also the joy. Scotellaro writes the hell out of hell and heaven too!”
—Jeff Friedman, author of The Marksman and Floating Tales
Ways to Read the World
(Scantic Books, 2022)
“Ways to Read the World is another masterwork by a brilliant weaver of the compact tale. Robert Scotellaro’s ability to compress whole worlds into a few sentences is singular, profoundly entertaining, and illuminating. As with the author’s previous flash fiction collections, this new offering challenges the reader’s complacency and imagination—a sudden turn of phrase and the train is off its tracks and bound in unexpected directions. The innovative triptych format works to marvelous effect, expanding and enriching the themes and motifs of its luminous prosetry. Scotellaro’s artistry, wit, and insight are on exquisite display in this superb new volume. A triple delight and triumph.”
–– Michael C. Keith, author Insomnia 11 and Quiet Geography
“No one has a deeper and more playful literary imagination than Robert Scotellaro. The triptychs in Ways to Read the World conjure up vivid worlds that are sometimes humorous, sometimes unsettling and oftentimes both—but always, always, supremely entertaining.”
—Tom Hazuka, co-editor of Flash Fiction and Flash Nonfiction Funny
What Are the Chances?
(Press 53, 2020)
“Dip into What Are the Chances? for lightning-quick glimpses into the human soul: An eldercare worker with an uncanny ability to finish sentences, an alluring woman in a squid mask, a couple who make love in front of funhouse mirrors, skateboarders in an empty swimming pool…a hit man in retirement. Here are promises, anticipations, titillations, regrets.”
—Jane Ciabattari, BBC Culture, The Literary Hub
“In What Are The Chances? Robert Scotellaro offers us spelunkers and pot-smoking nuns and birthday party clowns… In a heartbeat, we spiral into lives both ordinary yet on the edge of change and danger, and over the course of just a few pages, he lays bare damaged hearts and offers connections as tenuous as they are tender… These stories are small, but they pack a heavyweight’s punch. Scotellaro is truly a master of the flash fiction form.”
—Curtis Smith, author of The Magpie’s Return
Nothing Is Ever One Thing
(Blue Light Press, 2019)
“Nothing Is Ever One Thing is a Master Class in flash fiction. These elegant stories shine a slanted light on the high wire act of human existence with a unique blend of pathos and grit. Robert Scotellaro’s microfictions are breathtaking little epiphanies.”
—Meg Pokrass, author of Damn Sure Right and Alligators at Night
“Nothing Is Ever One Thing is a perfect Scotellaro stew of geishas, bingo callers, stuntmen, and musical saw bands, sprinkled throughout with micro-fables and other tasty bits. The magic and beauty of chance are celebrated along with the various relationships we live in every day. Brilliant stories from the pen of a flash fiction master.”
—Francine Witte, author of The Way of the Wind and Dressed All Wrong for This
New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction
(W.W. Norton & Company, 2018)
“Reading these wonderful tiny fictions is like stealing food from the refrigerator before, or after, dinner. A sublime luxury.”
—Frederick Barthelme, New World Writing
“These micro fictions violate the laws of geophysics by compressing whole lives / whole worlds / whole heartbreaks into something like diamonds: bright, riven, reflective, edged, wonderful, and hard enough to cut through glass.”
—Pam Houston, author of Contents May Have Shifted
(Big Table Publishing, 2016)
“You can’t be complacent when you read Robert Scotellaro’s stories. He’s a master of the miniature tale, wielding concision like a sculptor’s knife… These 100-word stories are both barbed and beautiful.”
– Grant Faulkner
Author of Fissures and co-founder and editor of 100 Word Story
(Blue Light Press, 2015)
“Scotellaro’s flash stories, sentence by sentence, ride disjunction to dazzling heights of hilarity, hard won wisdom, and the sweetest grief. He is the sublime story teller of tiny lives colliding with big moments.”
– Pamela Painter
Author of Wouldn’t You Like to Know
and The Long and Short of It
(Blue Light Press, 2012)
“Every story in Measuring the Distance starts with a bang and never lets go of us. I read right through the book, led on from amazement to amazement.”
– X. J. Kennedy
Author of Dark Horses and Cross Ties: Selected Poems
Wikipedia
Find out more about Robert Scotellaro and his contribution to Flash Fiction at Wikipedia.