Weaving in and out of the space that connects life and death in mysterious ways, these texts use carefully honed language that suggests a newfound spirituality.

    Robert Swartwood was inspired by Ernest Hemingway's possibly apocryphal six-word story—"For Sale: baby shoes, never worn"—to foster the writing of these incredibly short-short stories. He termed them "hint fiction" because the few chosen words suggest a larger, more complex chain of events. Spare and evocative, these stories prove that a brilliantly honed narrative can be as startling and powerful as a story of traditional length. The 125 gemlike stories in this collection come from such best-selling and award-winning authors as Joyce Carol Oates, Ha Jin, Peter Straub, and James Frey, as well as emerging writers.

    Like his previous works, Asunder is a study in the usage of language. Lopez carefully considers each word before leaving it on the page, and it shows.

    Her characters love and lose and long for more as if their lives depended on it. And they do.

    He still writes her name as a solution to crossword puzzle clues of suitable length. Alex Epstein’s miniature stories are indeed love stories, puzzles, stray clues, the beginnings or ends of philosophical treatises, parables, modernized legends, or perhaps a vivid handful of images thrown together, then allowed to disperse. This is a form of which he has been hailed as a master, a form as singular and intricate as a collection of fingerprints. His stories are populated by angels, chess players, mythical figures, Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, lovers young and old, writers of disappearing languages; they are set in airports, trains, the sites of legends, hotels, bookstores in countries that no longer exist, dreams. In each of them, Epstein draws precisely the smallest possible world, and revels in the great possibilities of a single sentence. In each of them, we are invited to celebrate everything that can happen before “the tip of the pencil breaks against the bright paper.”

    Filled with 365 short stories, this is a fun and practical anthology designed for busy readers.