Wild Life is a collection of thirty-four (34) "undomesticated" flash fiction pieces."Keep this book on your bedside table. Dog-ear it until all the pages are folded. Read it in the bath, teach it, store it in your bag, recite it on street corners. When people stop to ask you what you are doing, tell them that you are reading aloud from a collection by the best flash fiction writer in America." ~ Amelia Gray, Author of AM/PM and Museum of The Weird"People often say the purpose of flash fiction is to shine a spotlight, to illuminate, to light up our lives, a flash of insight. This to me has always seemed a dull reason to do anything, much less write or read flash fiction. And I think Kathy Fish proves the point, here in this book. Who cares what she may teach us, in flashes of blinding light or otherwise, in these stories so carefully built, so wonderfully turned of phrase. What Kathy does is expose us not to insight but to mystery. She puts us in the middle of these worlds she's made and says, Look what I've seen. And then when we do, when we come to these stories' ends, we shudder with confusion and love." ~ Joseph Young, Author of Easter Rabbit and Name

Wild Life

Kathy, Fish

Matter Press

Carol Guess explains, "This tiny book is based on the index of my father's co-edited anthology, The Science of the Placebo. I selected terms from the index of his book and used them to organize a fractured, fragmented narrative that was originally part of a longer manuscript titled Hand mit Ringen. While I was working on Doll Studies: Forensics, I winnowed part of that longer manuscript into the story of a vet returning from WWII. It appears in Doll Studies as "Departure Lounge." Then I worried and revised and changed the remaining material, adding and subtracting, returning to the original narrative: the story of two women, a plane crash, and too many cameras. Guided at first by the NATO phonetic alphabet, I eventually used the index of my father's book to structure their story, which became Index of Placebo Effects. As always, I miss my father, and wish I could share this process with him. I suppose the path to scientific discovery is not that different from the path to a story: hard work and happy accidents."

Index of Placebo Effects

Carol Guess

Modern Manners for Your Inner Demons

Tara Laskowski

Written by Matter Press's founder and managing editor Randall Brown, A Pocket Guide to Flash Fiction provides NOT the way to write flash fiction, but SOME ways to make your writing flash! Contents include the following: What is Flash Flash Craft Flash in a Single Scene Flash in a Series of Scenes Monomythic Flash Episodic Flash Counterpointed Flash Defamiliarized Flash Revision Prose Poemy Flash The Pocket Guide also includes articles and flashes from various writers including Pamela Painter, Quinn Dalton, Dan Holt, Pen Campbell, Brady Udall, Sean Lovelace, Myfanwy Collins, Kathy Fish, Carol Guess, and Jeff Landon.

A Pocket Guide to Flash Fiction

Randall Brown

The online flash journal collects the "best of" the nearly 600 different writers published during their first ten years.

SmokeLong Quarterly: The Best of the First Ten Years, 2003-2013

Elaine Chiew

Christopher Allen's flash fiction collection OTHER HOUSEHOLD TOXINS blends the hard and the soft, humor and grit, from, as Michelle Elvy writes, broke-down to disoriented to absurd." OTHER HOUSEHOLD TOXINS could "well serve as a flash fiction primer,' says Kathy Fish. The "stories are smart, fresh, and deeply moving." Michelle Elvy similarly sees "in this powerful collection," stories that "reveal glimpses of our own humanity," flash fiction that "becomes a gentle means of revealing knotted realities." This flash collection, as Sara Lippmann writes, "blends the personal with the fantastical to forge...[a] remarkable mythology." "These stories," writes Robert Vaughan, "are convincing, touching portraits of the marginalized. This collection is among the most densely imagined, ingeniously constructed and finely mature works of fiction." 
 Christopher Allen's short fiction has garnered acclaim from Glimmer Train, SmokeLong Quarterly, Literal Latte, Indiana Review, and others. He is also the author of Conversations with S. Teri O'Type (a Satire) and is currently the managing editor of SmokeLong Quarterly. Originally from Tennessee, he now lives somewhere in Europe. Find him online at www.imustbeoff.com.

Other Household Toxins

Christopher Allen

As this vast collection of [fifty] stories shows, Fish is a tireless flash fiction maven and master. What can you say about a writer who has come to be synonymous with the short short form that hasn't already been said? Anyone familiar with her work knows: Fish can write, and she doesn't need a lot of words to press a bruise or ignite a spark of hope in your heart. - KRISTEN M. PLOETZ

Wild Life: Collected Works 2003-2018

Maids

Abby Frucht

"...supremely entertaining collection of bite-size yarns." - Nicholas Litchfield, editor of Lowestoft Chronicle "Remarkably, each piece pulses, a transcendent pleasure, capturing a moment of light-headed syncope, tipsy abandonment, and, yes, drained and draining grace." - Michael Martone, author of The Moon Over Wapakoneta and Brooding "[These] stories open up the night, ignore the stars and planets, and take you into worlds you don't want to leave." - Pamela Painter, Ways to Spend the Night

When I Can't Sleep

Robert Garner McBrearty

This book matches the macro photography of Meg Boscov with the micro writing of Randall Brown to create 52 weekly lyrical essays for weekly creative inspiration.

Hand-in-Hand

Meg Boscov

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Books by Matter Press