Sudden Fiction Latino: Short-short Stories from The United States and Latin America edited by Robert Shapard, James Thomas, and Ray Gonzalez (2010)

I got this copy of the anthology Sudden Fiction Latino: Short-short Stories from The United States and Latin America edited by Robert Shapard, James Thomas, and Ray Gonzalez (2010) from the always fabulous LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. This is part of a series of anthologies featuring "short-short" or "flash" fiction -- that is, short stories that are at the most a few pages long, and often even shorter than that.

In this anthology, the editors bring together stories from Latin American authors (in translation) and Latino authors in the United States. There are plenty of recognizable names (in fact, possibly every major Latin American or Latino author that I can think of is here: Junot Díaz, Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Sandra Císneros, Isabel Allende, Rudolfo Anaya, Roberto Bolaño, Julio Ortega, and the list goes on), as well as a whole slew of authors that I have never heard of before, but whom I now really want to check out. The stories are sometimes metaphorical, sometimes straightforward, sometimes experimental, sometimes comedic, and sometimes bitingly tragic. I love reading short stories, and the compressed nature of this "sudden" fiction highlights everything that makes the short story format great.

This is an astutely edited, wonderfully written book. And, as an aside, it is possibly the perfect thing to read in a crowded airport and a boring flight.