At Necessary Fiction, Rachael Nevins has written a generous and probing review of my latest book, New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction.

Flash fiction has flourished since the publication of Sudden Fictionin 1983, which included stories no longer than 1,500 words. In 1986, Jerome Stern challenged fiction writers to compress their stories further when he launched The World’s Best Short-Short Story Contest at Florida State University, which limited entries to 250 words. “Trying to write a serious piece of fiction in under 250 words sounds at first like being asked to perform a particularly perverse experiment, like being asked to paint a landscape on a grain of rice,” he wrote a decade later in the introduction to Micro Fiction: An Anthology of Fifty Really Short Stories, a collection of stories both drawn from the contest and commissioned from other writers, for whom the word limit was expanded to 300. New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction, edited by James Thomas and Robert Scotellaro, is a new anthology of 300-or-fewer-word “micros” whose title is a tribute to Stern’s earlier anthology.

Read the whole review at Necessary Fiction, here.