Best Microfiction 2023

Meg Pokrass, Gary Fincke, and Deb Olin Unferth, editors

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WINNER of the Bronze Medal for a book series in the 2021 Independent Publisher Book Awards

The Best Microfiction anthology series provides recognition for outstanding literary stories of 400 words or fewer. Co-edited by award-winning microfiction writer/editor Meg Pokrass, and Flannery O’Connor Prize-winning author Gary Fincke, the anthology features Deb Olin Unferth serving as final judge, four essays & other insights, and eighty-three of the world's best very short short stories.

Other books in the series: Best Microfiction

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“These are small, arresting stories that cut right to the heart of the matter, demonstrating that a story well told, no matter how small, expands beyond the space it inhabits.” Robert Scotellaro, author of God in a Can and Ways to Read the World

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“Yes, this is how it is done. Beautiful, brooding, erotic, mysterious, idiosyncratic words shaped into thunderbolts, shocks that reveal what we didn’t know we know. Words filled with promise, bewildering and enchanting us. This is flash at its best, flash now.” Jane Ciabattari, columnist, BBC Culture, The Literary Hub

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Meg Pokrass, series editor, is the author of 7 flash fiction collections, an award-winning collection of prose poetry, 2 flash-novellas and 2 new co-written collections of flash, Picking Up the Moose, co-written with Jeff Friedman (Pelekinesis, 2022) and Disappearing Debutantes, co-written with Aimee Parkison (Outpost 19, 2023). Her work has appeared in hundreds of literary magazines and international anthologies including Electric Literature, Wigleaf, Washington Square Review, American Journal of Poetry, McSweeney's has appeared in 2 Norton anthologies of the flash fiction form: New Micro (W.W. Norton & Co., 2018), Flash Fiction International (W.W. Norton & Co., 2015). Meg is the Founding Editor of New Flash Fiction Review, Flash Challenge Columnist for Mslexia Magazine, and teaches private microfiction workshops.
Gary Fincke, editor, has published thirty-one books of poetry, short fiction, and nonfiction, most recently, Bringing Back the Bones: New and Selected Poems, A Room of Rain: Stories, and The Killer’s Dog: Stories.
Deb Olin Unferth is the author of six books, including the novel Barn 8. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, the New York Times, The Paris Review, Granta, NOON, Conjunctions, and McSweeney’s. She has received a Guggenheim fellowship, three Pushcart Prizes, and a Creative Capital Fellowship, and she was a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award. A professor at the University of Texas at Austin, she also directs the Pen City Writers, a creative-writing program at a south Texas penitentiary.