Update: Snow White and her 7 Dwarves

Hyper-compressions: The rise of flash fiction in “post-transitional” South Africa

“…That these anthologies’ shortest pieces are folktales is at least germane, given that flash has antecedents, perhaps roots, in oral tradition. More recently, the publisher’s blurb for Twenty in 20: The Best Short Stories of South Africa’s Twenty Years of Democracy (Langa et al, 2014), which it promotes as “a longstanding reference for South African literary posterity”, hails Chris van Wyk’s “Relatives” (1995) as a “miniature masterpiece”; but this is towards the upper limit for a “sudden”, a category into which the anthology’s shortest piece, Wamuwi Mbao’s “The Bath” (2013; around 1250 words), more comfortably fits. Only a story inset within Van Wyk’s “miniature” might be considered a flash.…”

“…Within South Africa, three anthologies wholly or partly devoted to local flash have appeared, the first two arising from women’s writing workshops: Women Flashing (Fisher, 2005), which includes 55-word stories (known as “55 fiction”); Writing the Self (Schuster et al, 2008), which includes 100-word stories (known as “drabbles”); and My Holiday Shorts (Mabaso, 2013). Fiction of flash-length regularly appears in domestic literary magazines like New Contrast , and at least two stories have appeared under the heading “Flash Fiction” in English Academy Review , the peer-reviewed journal of the English Academy of Southern Africa (Gardiner, 2010; Gottschalk, 2013). Two notable single-author collections have been published by Johannesburg’s Botsotso: Horwitz’s Out of the Wreckage: Dream Parables (2008), which mixes flashes and suddens, and Jobson’s 100 Papers: A Collection of Prose Poems and Flash Fiction (2008).…”