Fiction. MY VERY END OF THE UNIVERSE is a celebration and study of an increasingly popular genre: the novella-in-flash, a novella built of standalone flash stories. The novellas in this collection—Betty Superman by Tiff Holland, Here, Where We Live by Meg Pokrass, Shampoo Horns by Aaron Teel, Bell and Bargain by Margaret Patton Chapman, and The Family Dogs by Chris Bower—are compact and specific, yet whole and universal, using the flexibility of the genre to offer a polyphony of setting and emotion. Accompanying each novella-in-flash is a craft essay by the author exploring the form's power, uses, and unique characteristics. The book opens with a genre-defining introduction to the novella-in-flash by editors Abigail Beckel and Kathleen Rooney, which also offers historical and contemporary context. Chris Bower is a writer and teacher based in Chicago. He is the curator and host of the Ray's Tap Reading Series and a founding member of Found Objects Theatre Group. Little Boy Needs Ride, his book of short stories with illustrations by Susie Kirkwood, is forthcoming in 2015 from Curbside Splendor Publishing. Margaret Patton Chapman received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her short fiction has appeared in Wigleaf, The Collagist, SmokeLong, Elimae, and in the anthology The Way We Sleep, among others. She is prose editor for decomP magazine, and currently lives in Durham, North Carolina. Tiff Holland is originally from Ohio. She attended The Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. Her poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction appear regularly in literary magazines and anthologies and have won several awards. Her novella-in-flash Betty Superman won the Rose Metal Press Fifth Annual Short Short Chapbook Contest in 2011. She has taught creative writing and literature at Kent State, University of Southern Mississippi, and Austin Community College. She currently lives in Hawaii. Meg Pokrass is the author of Damn Sure Right (Press 53, 2011) and Bird Envy (Printed on Paige, 2014). Her flash fiction appears in 200 literary journals including Green Mountains Review, Five Points, storySouth, McSweeney's, and Flash Fiction International (W.W. Norton, 2015). Meg serves as associate editor for Rick Barthelme's New World Writing. She lives in San Francisco with a dog and two cats. Aaron Teel hails from Austin, Texas, and is currently an MFA fiction fellow at Washington University in St. Louis. His work has appeared previously in Tin House, Smokelong Quarterly, Monkeybicycle, Brevity, and others. His novella- in-flash Shampoo Horns won the Rose Metal Press Sixth Annual Short Short Chapbook Contest in 2012.

My Very End of the Universe: Five Novellas-in-Flash and a Study of the Form

Literature & Fiction

Pokrass, Meg

Bower, Chris

Chapman, Margaret Patton

Holland, Tiff

Teel, Aaron

Contemporary

Rose Metal Press

Serious and witty, mystical and dark, these short stories by Meg Pokrass are small windows into another world, a world that is almost this onebut not quite. In her masterful pieces, Pokrass leads her readers on, page by page, enticing them with her beautiful and dream-like language. Bopping and slamming through these little stories like some genius world tour of the human heart, Pokrass gets a lot done in the shortest spaces imaginable. This collection of tiny, intimate truffles is as powerful as soul-chocolate infused with caffeine. Each of these 50 stories contains bite-sized glimpses into the lives of everyday people, leaving the reader with the long and lasting effects of a full-length novel. Each chapter delves into relevant life events that require further contemplation. Her language is supercharged and witty, with humor and sadness in approximately equal amounts, revealing the dark truth and reality of the world.
The people in these stories need Meg Pokrass. Their lives are tough but her imagination is the fire-lasso that can save them, save us. In her work, off-kilter is the same as clear-eyed focus. Here, strange and normal go hand-in-hand, a marriage that explains nothing but makes so much clear. Time after time, these little stories read big. Bob Hicok, author of Elegy Owed
With The Dog Looks Happy Upside Down, Flash Fiction comes of age. Bill Roorbach, author of The Remedy for Love and Life Among Giants
Supercharged and witty, with humor and sadness in approximately equal amounts Bobbie Ann Mason, author of Shiloh and Other Stories
These sexy but wistful prose poems hint at entire constellations of affections, relationships at once sweet, sad, satisfyingand not. Molly Peacock, author of The Second Blush
Pokrass writes books you want on your nightstand to read not once, but again and again. Nin Andrews, author of Why God Is A Woman
I dare you to read a Meg Pokrass sentence and not want to read the next. Just enter that voice voice and it makes magic. It’s the kind where you don’t know where you’re going until you’ve left, but you know it was deeply right to have been there. Unassuming, ridiculous, insightful, dark.Robert Shapard, editor of seven anthologies for W.W. Norton including Sudden Fiction and Flash Fiction International 
Meg Pokrass is a leading American writer of the flash fiction form. She is the author of four previous flash fiction collections: Bird Envy (Harvard Book Store, 2014); Damn Sure Right (Press 53, 2011); Cellulose Pajamas (Blue Light Press, 2015); and My Very End of the Universe, Five Mini-Novellas-in-Flash and a Study of the Form (Rose Metal Press, 2014). Her stories have appeared in more than 200 literary magazines, including McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Green Mountains Review, The Rumpus, storySouth and numerous anthologies, including Flash Fiction International (W. W. Norton, 2015).

The Dog Looks Happy Upside Down

Humor & Satire

Etruscan Press

Meg Pokrass has written an exquisite collection of linked stories. As I read Spinning to Mars I felt plunged, soaked, immersed-however you want to get down into a life both deep and wide. This book will spin you off to Mars with its exacting language and biting insight. Here is the kind of compressed writing that I long for and rarely find. &#65279;Meg Pokrass is the author of seven flash fiction collections, including "Damn Sure Right" (Press 53, 2011), "The Dog Looks Happy Upside Down" (Etruscan Press, 2016), "The Dog Seated Next to Me", (Pelekinesis, 2019), "Cellulose Pajamas" (Blue Light Book Award, 2016), the chapbooks "An Object At Rest" (Ravenna Press, 2020) and "Alice in Wonderland Syndrome" (V. Press, 2020) and two novellas-in-flash: "Here, Where We Live" (Rose Metal Press, 2014) and "The Loss Detector" (Bamboo Dart Press, 2020). Meg's flash fiction, prose poetry and hybrid writing has been widely internationally anthologized; in New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (W.W. Norton & Co., 2018) and Flash Fiction International (W.W. Norton & Co., 2015), The Best Small Fictions (2018 & 2019), the Wigleaf Top 50, The Best Irish and British Flash Fiction Award, as well as many other anthologies. Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, Waxwing, Washington Square Review, Tin House, Smokelong, McSweeney's, Wigleaf, MoonPark Review, Five Points, Hobart Pulp, Split Lip, and over the last decade, nearly one-thousand literary journals. Meg serves as Founding Co-Editor of the Best Microfiction anthology series and Festival Curator for Flash Fiction Festival, U.K.

Spinning to Mars

Poetry

Blue Light Press

Meg Pokrass is the author of "Damn Sure Right" (Press 53, 2011); "My Very End of the Universe, Five Mini-Novellas-in-Flash and a Study of the Form" (Rose Metal Press, 2014) and "Bird Envy" (Harvard Bookstore bestseller). Her stories have appeared in more than 200 literary magazines and anthologies, including McSweeney's Internet Tendency, PANK, Green Mountains Review, Five Points, and numerous anthologies, including Flash Fiction International (W.W. Norton). A third full flash fiction collection "The Dog Looks Happy Upside Down" is forthcoming from Etruscan Press (Spring, 2016). Meg serves as associate editor for Frederick Barthelme's New World Writing, and is the founder of New Flash Fiction Review. Meg currently divides her time between San Francisco and London, England. ENDORSEMENTS: In a smattering of sassy, wry words Meg Pokrass creates a universe of love in Cellulose Pajamas. These sexy but wistful prose poems hint at entire constellations of affections, relationships at once sweet, sad, satisfying-and not. The poet's delicately surreal metaphors give her poems so enticing an air that they seem to wear perfume. Care to lounge about dressed in greens? Try on Meg Pokrass's splendid Cellulose Pajamas. -Molly Peacock, Author of The Second Blush Serious and witty, mystical and dark, Pokrass' poems are small windows into another world, a world which is almost this world. But not quite. I find myself wanting more, always a little more of her work. One short poem, one small collection, it is never enough. In short, and in her very short and masterful pieces, Pokrass leads her readers on, page by page, enticing them with her beautiful and dream-like language. Pokrass' writes books you want on your nightstand to read not once, but again and again. -Nin Andrews, Author of The Book of Orgasms, Spontaneous Breasts, Why They Grow Wings, Midlife Crisis with Dick and Jane, Sleeping with Houdini, and Dear Professor, Do You Live in a Vacuum I have admired Meg Pokrass's work for a long time-Damn Sure Right and Bird Envy among other books. Cellulose Pajamas contains that same bold quality: stories painful and joyful at once. Meg Pokrass proves once again that she can write an epic on the head of a pin!" -John Skoyles, poetry editor, Ploughsares. Author of A Little Faith; Permanent Change; Definition of the Soul and The Situation, A Moveable Famine and The Nut File Meg Pokrass has the gift of a fluid imagination. Strange and beautiful prose poems pour across the pages of her new book in a confluence of the surreal and the mundane. It's as if Raymond Carver and Russell Edson had collaborated on these fine poems, which manage to be fierce and vulnerable at the same time. Cellulose Pajamas is a moving, haunting, riveting book. -Ellery Akers, Author of Practicing the Truth, and Knocking on the Earth Prose poems require a particular intensity to be truly successful. Pokrass has no problem with that constraint. This book is a breathtaking as racing a car. There isn't a single one of these fireworks that doesn't completely satisfy. One of those few writers who can handle this form with grace and room after room full of magic. -D.R. Wagner, Author of 20 books and chapbooks of poetry and letters (Rattlesnake Press)

Cellulose Pajamas

Flash Fiction Festival Four

Jones, Karen

O'Connor, Nuala

Hershman, Tania

Stohlman, Nancy

Balagopal, Sudha

Carle, K B

Fish, Kathy

Festival, Flash Fiction

Elkes, K M

Literary

Ad Hoc Fiction

Damn Sure Right, the "wonderful, dark, unforgiving" (Frederick Barthelme) debut by Meg Pokrass, "conveys entire worlds that are touching, haunting, funny, moving, and strange in the most beautiful ways" (Jessica Anya Blau). "The brew master of flash" (Sean Lovelace), Pokrass writes "like a brain looking for a body" (Frederick Barthelme), making her the "new monarch of the delightful and enigmatic tiny kingdom of mirco- and flash fiction" (Brad Watson). This collection of eighty-four tales is sure to "ruin your waking hours the way you'll want them ruined" (Kyle Minor).

Damn Sure Right

Genre Fiction

Press 53

In Disappearing Debutantes, disappearing and ever present "female beginners" come-of-age in fantasy and reality. As children, girls, teens, "new adults," middle-aged women, and old women, they keep having their debuts and going unnoticed. Erased by gender, time, age, and those they most want to see them, neglected females become strange in hopes of being loved, being listened to, being understood, and being seen. Though society has no interest in allowing them to make a grand entrance on a life they keep trying to live anew, and though the bloom is long off the rose that never fully opened, each disappearing woman refuses to make a graceful exit or to blossom into the perfect flowery fem society wants her to become. Instead, she boldly celebrates her oddly transformative disappearance from a life that didn't go as planned by exploring a self-charted, self-made, surreal world of love, longing, lust, and lore.

Disappearing Debutantes

Parkison, Aimee

Outpost19

An evil teddy bear, a mermaid, a robot daughter, a ghost child. A mother surrendering her baby to the crows. A child consumed by lice from the inside out. A father sending his selkie daughter back to the sea. These flash stories and essays explore the whispered side of parenting—the loss, fear, vulnerability, and deep, deep love that lurks underneath our day-to-day lives as mothers and fathers. One glimpse into And If That Mockingbird Don’t Sing, and you’ll never look at parenting in quite the same way again.

And If That Mockingbird Don't Sing: Parenting Stories Gone Speculative

Campbell, Olivia

Bellinger, DeMisty D.

Fortmeyer, Kendra

Hirsch, Aubrey

Figg, Melanie

Grieco, Hannah

Burges, Audrey

Stanfill, Laura

Lin, Jami Nakamura

Short Stories & Anthologies

Alternating Current

Kissing the Monster Hunter is a book about monster hunters, unseen monsters, perpetual dreamers, and the creatures (human and otherwise) who love them. The unmissable prose poems and micros in this collection thrust us into an alternate reality where hope, love, and intimacy, when gone unrecognized, become a mystical force to be reckoned with.

Kissing the Monster Hunter

Bamboo Dart Press

Fiction. Meg Pokrass's sixth collection of flash fiction represents best in class of the short literary form: miniature stories that will jump into your lap and let you stroke them, fierce stories that will frighten you, snarl and bare their teeth. For those who don't like dogs, there are love-struck cockroaches, six-foot spiders, blue-tongued skinks, Margaret Thatcher-like spouses, and horny night bugs. Meg Pokrass's stories are about the necessary animals sitting next to all of us.

The Dog Seated Next to Me

Pelekinesis

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