About Fiction 500

“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
Ernest Hemingway (attrib.)

‘Flash fiction’, ‘micro fiction’, ‘sudden fiction’, ‘micro-stories’, ‘postcard fiction’, ‘short shorts’, ‘short short stories’. Whatever name you know it by, small but perfectly formed fiction has a long tradition from Aesop’s Fables, Japanese haiku and Arabian Sufism through Chekhov and Kafka, Borges and Cortázar, H.P. Lovecraft, Italo Calvino, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Richard Brautigan and Kurt Vonnegut, to Dan Rhodes, Etgar Keret and Andrés Neuman. Here we invite emerging and established authors to submit stories of around 500 words or fewer to explore the genre.