| Title | : | Fissures: One Hundred 100-Word Stories |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | - |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781941209202 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 122 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 2015 |
—Pamela Painter, author of Wouldn't You Like to Know
Grant Faulkner’s stories are poetic and creepy and funny and touching and you’re going to have a swell time. I wish I had written some of them.
—Lou Beach, author of 420 Characters
Grant Faulkner is the impresario of 100-word stories. The 100 tantalizing fictions in Fissures shock and please—a precious pile of sparkling surprises.
—Jane Ciabattari, author of Stealing the Fire and California Stories
Grant Faulkner’s sharply observed, darkly funny, heart-breaking bursts of highly compressed prose offers a startling view of what reality might look like through a funhouse microscope. Fissures pushes the boundaries of flash prose, and thank goodness for that. Sometimes less is so much more.
—Dinty W. Moore, author of Dear Mister Essay Writer Guy: Advice and Confessions on Writing, Love, and Cannibals
Fissures: One Hundred 100-Word Stories Reviews
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Grant Faulkner is a conjurer. He waves his hands over a page, a few dozen words fall, and from them whole lives echo, small and tinny but going on for hours.
You ask most folks in the know what distinguishes a prose poem from flash fiction -- especially microfiction like these tiny 100-word stories -- and they'll tell you, not much. And truth be told, some of these pieces in Fissures do feel a bit more like poetry, or old-fashioned sketches, or vignettes, or disembodied scenes. But that doesn't deprive any of them of their immense power, and even in such impressionistic brevity, most of these stories are true stories, whole narratives tossed on the page with the minimum strokes of a pen, like some Japanese painting.
It helps that so many of the stories are connected -- I look forward to rereading this whole book and piecing together the longer narrative of Gerard and Celeste, or of Zabeth. And of course there is the central eight-story cycle of Alexander, the filmmaker.
But really, there is equal magic in the isolated, momentary lives of Stockton and Sophie postcoital on a Victorian couch, of Tom and his father in the silver LTD, of Margery and George drinking martinis in jelly jars, of all the nameless "I" narrators and "you" subjects and hes and shes of these intimate little worlds.
It's quite a feat, this book, and it serves not only as a beautiful artifact of the microfiction form but also as a kind of textbook. If ever you wanted to know how to write a full story in a mere 100 words, here are your instructions: take up Grant Faulkner, read, and read again. -
Some absolute winners in here! Faulkner creates an astonishing world in so few words. LOVE!
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Innovative, and both playful and profound.
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Powerful nuggets. Sometimes a whole relationship is reflected in a shard of mirror.
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Each one of these 100-word stories is like looking through a keyhole. You get a tantalizing glimpse of what's happening, but you have to imagine the rest.
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Interesting concept, really well executed, this collection of one hundred 100-word stories is captivating. Occasionally I wished the stipulation was not so strict and the story could expand, but most of the time, it felt just right.
“Life is suspension, the swaying of another’s disregard.”
