We are thrilled to announce that selections have been made for the 2025 anthology. Congratulations to these amazing pieces of short fiction by these terrific authors whose work will be included in the annual anthology. The 2025 edition will be available from Alternating Current Press this fall.
Best Small Fictions is the first-ever contemporary anthology solely dedicated to anthologizing the best internationally published short hybrid fiction in a given calendar year. Now in its tenth year of existence, Best Small Fictions features the best microfiction, flash fiction, haibun stories, and prose poetry from around the world.
“This Little Catalog You’ve Been Assembling” by Rosa Alcalá / The Hopkins Review
“Thread” by Mikki Aronoff / The Mackinaw
“Tokyo Panorama Suite” by Cassandra Atherton / The Mackinaw
“Record of Lumber Used in the Great Temple’s Main Hall” by Stewart C. Baker / Sans Press
“And We Know” by Rebecca Ball / Flash Frontier
“All Made-Up” by Megan Baxter / Diagram
“Evacuated” by Aimee Bender / Vestal Review
“Wool” by Carly Berwick / The Cincinnati Review
“Something That I Learned from Someone Who Is Gone” by Darsie Bowden / The Prose Poem
“Doubting the Enterprise” by Brady Brickner-Wood / Sonora Review
“Sundays Are for Yard Work” by Kate Brody / Electric Literature
“Tell Me I’d Look Pretty on Your Wall” by Sébastien Luc Butler / Hayden’s Ferry Review
“Things I Did to Live” by Joseph Byrd / Exposition Review
“You Work in the Worst Diner in Existence That’s Always Open for Business” by Avitus B. Carle / X-Ray Literary Magazine
“Razia, Razia” by Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar / The Good Life Review
“Cumulonimbi” by Christine H. Chen / Flash Flood
“NASA Plays I’ll Be Seeing You Trying to Wake the Mars Rover” by Chloe N. Clark / Banshee Press
“Small Places” by Majella Cullinane / Meantime
“Her Heart Was a Chipmunk” by Michael Czyzniejewski / Cleaver Magazine
“This Because Dog Is God Spelled Backward” by Erinola E. Daranijo / Okay Donkey
“Blue-Naped Parrots See More Than They Say” by Judy Darley / New Flash Fiction Review
“Some Guilty Pleasures on This Side of the Border” by Moisés R. Delgado / Craft
“Family Politics” by Ehiorobo Derek / African Poetry Book Fund Evaristo Prize 2024 Co-Winner
“Things We Do for Loved Ones” by Thad DeVassie / Vast Literary Press
“On Loneliness” by Merridawn Duckler / MacQueen’s Quinterly
“What Would the Aliens Think?” by Ekpenyong Kosisochukwu Collins / SmokeLong Quarterly
“Roofing in Warm Weather” by Corey Farrenkopf / Brilliant Flash Fiction
“Based on a True Story” by Epiphany Ferrell / Witcraft
“Nesting Doll” by Melissa Flores Anderson / Swamp Pink
“At Once” by Sarah Freligh / Ghost Parachute
“Whale Fall” by Shauna Friesen / Gone Lawn
“Lottery” by Scott Garson / Centaur
“No Ponyboy” by Faithna Geffrard / Susurrus
“They Fired Up the Laser” by Timothy C. Goodwin / Dishsoap Quarterly
“Finding the Water to Cry” by Jacqueline Goyette / Stanchion
“After Reading a Newspaper Clipping of Emily Dickinson’s Obituary Online” by Charlotte Hamrick / Gooseberry Pie Lit Magazine
“Five Things She Brought with Her to the End of the World” by Fatema Haque / Hayden’s Ferry Review
“The Beak” by Robbie Herbst / The Masters Review
“Trespasser, Singular” by Alex Herod / Trash Cat Lit
“Acorns / Hard / Underfoot on the Pavement” by D. G. Herring / Splonk
“A Cock Among the Bathers” by Sara Hills / Bath Flash Fiction Award
“One Summer” by Zac Hing / Takahē
“Ledge (Ars Poetica) (Love Poem) (True Story)” by Amorak Huey / The Cincinnati Review
“The Comeback” by Lincoln Jaques / Micro Madness
“A Girl Experiments with Being Human” by Ruth Joffre / Barrelhouse
“A Day in the Zoo” by Brianna Johnson / Emerge Literary Journal
“Off a Duck’s Back” by Jupiter Jones / Tiny Sparks Everywhere
“How to Bake a Cake in Outer Space” by Audra Kerr Brown / Moon City Review
“Enough” by Mike Kilgannon / Bridport Prize
“Family Night” by Ani King / SmokeLong Quarterly
“The Long Walk North” by Caitlyn Kinsella / The Citron Review
“I’ve Been Getting Letters from Santa for Twenty Years and All I’ve Learned Is He’s an Asshole” by Nicola Koh / Okay Donkey
“Cowboy” by Francesca Leader / Southeast Review
“Let’s Go Holoholo” by Melissa Llanes Brownlee / Wigleaf
“Apparitions” by Arthur Mandal / Bending Genres
“Aunt Lou” by Miriam McEwen / American Literary Review
“The Way We Love Each Other” by Rebecca Meacham / The Ilanot Review
“Pristine” by Douglas W. Milliken / Notch Magazine
“This Is What Always Happens” by Khalid Mitchell / Astrolabe
“Girl Locks” by Claudia Monpere / Split Lip Magazine
“The Days the Cartoons Crept Out the TV” by James Montgomery / Micro Madness
“Never Swim Alone” by Abigail Myers / JMWW
“The Marionette” by Ivan Niccolai / Ink in Thirds
“Swamp” by Catherine Niu / The Cincinnati Review
“Messiah” by Kate O’Grady / Fish Anthology 2024
“Little Flowers” by Gillian O’Shaughnessy / X-Ray Literary Magazine
“The Lesson of Flash Floods” by Pamela Painter / Chestnut Review
“Horsebroken” by Meg Pokrass / Fractured Lit
“Small Towns” by Sam Rasnake / Bending Genres
“Alternate Histories of El Salvador or Perhaps the World” by Ruben Reyes, Jr. / Bomb
“Driving My Seven-Year-Old Nephew to Visit His Mother at Rehab” by Emily Rinkema / Bath Flash Fiction Award
“Brittle Bones” by Belinda Rowe / Gone Lawn
“Your Childhood Was Witchcraft” by Eden Royce / Cleaver
“Crossing” by Thaddeus Rutkowski / Rathalla Review
“An Inexhaustive List of Places Where You Grieved for Your Mother” by Debabrata Sahoo / Vestal Review
“Daughter Fish” by Adrianna Sanchez-Lopez / The Citron Review
“Concrete Worm” by Noémi Scheiring-Oláh / Hayden’s Ferry Review
“A Trip to the Moon” by Nina Schuyler / Flash Fiction Magazine
“Carnivorous Roads” by Robert Scotellaro / New World Writing Quarterly
“Teddy Bear Pancake” by Chris Scott / Weird Lit Magazine
“Roller Coaster House” by Kyle Seibel / Had
“A Hole in the Glass” by Abhishek Sengupta / The Forge Literary Magazine
“How Do Crows Say I Love You?” by Beth Sherman / Tiny Molecules
“It Never Mattered What Happened at Home” by Sumitra Singam / The Forge Literary Magazine
“What We Do on a Night Like This” by Rachel Smith / Gooseberry Pie Lit Magazine
“The Importance of Stems” by Cheryl Snell / The Dribble Drabble Review
“Restless Coyote Pilfers the Night and She Does Not Need Your Judgment” by Sarah Sorensen / Jet Fuel Review
“She Is There” by Eraldo Souza dos Santos / Inkfish Magazine
“Pebbles” by Sarp Sozdinler / Atlas and Alice
“The Aquarium” by Anna Stacy / Lunch Ticket
“The Two Denvers” by Rebecca Starks / Craft
“Clean Floors” by Dawn Tasaka Steffler / The Welkin Writing Prize
“Psithurism” by Joshua Michael Stewart / Modern Haiku
“Prudence” by Christy Stillwell / New Flash Fiction Review
“Pupurangi Shelley” by Robert Sullivan / Hopurangi — Songcatcher: Poems from the Maramataka
“Sister, Sister” by Ayotola Tehingbola / Split Lip Magazine
“This That / That This” by Matthew Tomkinson / 3:AM Magazine
“Jewel Bearing” by Adam Trodd / Banshee Press
“This Thing in Our Chests” by Awo Twumwaah / Afreada
“Always Tomorrow” by Cathy Ulrich / MoonPark Review
“Bus Stop” by Rekha Valliappan / A-Minor Magazine
“Memory / I Send Myself” by Wangũi wa Kamonji / The Decolonial Passage
“Smoke and Ash” by Jesse Wallis / Hayden’s Ferry Review
“Memory in Three Acts” by Shannon K. Winston / Jet Fuel Review
“Splinter” by Didi Wood / Fractured Lit
“Cliché” by David Yourdon / Atlas and Alice
“Let Go of the Bones” by Yasmine Yu / Lost Balloon
“Nascent” by Tara Isabel Zambrano / Identity Theory
“Layered House” by Lucy Zhang / -ette Review
“Heads” by Tina S. Zhu / Cease, Cows
Thanks to these authors for sharing their incredible work with us and for trusting us to share it with the rest of the world. Congratulations on the selections.
