A New Collection of Short Stories and Flash Fiction Released - Summer Reading List

Find the key emotion; this may be all you need know to find your short story.”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

“A short story is the ultimate close-up magic trick – a couple of thousand words to take you around the universe or break your heart.”
– Neil Gaiman

“I even start novels. But something happens to them. They break up.”
– Alice Munro

The short story is once more in vogue. After Alice Munro, a short story author from Canada, won the Nobel Prize for literature at age 82– the short story seems to be experiencing a renaissance.

Every story has a life span. Whether that happens to be a novel, novella, short, or what has more recently arisen in the literary arts: flash fiction, each has its purpose and its format. Each is an art form. Like poetry. A short offers less meat and more action to get from beginning to middle to end. Flash offers even less to digest and puts you right in the action whereas a novel can meander and take its time with character development and placing the reader in the scene.

“As many author’s do, I have my own slush pile,” explains Poeltl, “I knew the vast majority of my random scenes and false starts wouldn’t sustain novel length works, and I realized that literary shorts play an important role for the reader. Many of the stories within the pages of my own anthology are such refugees. At least, that’s how they’d begun their literary lives: a thought, a quote, a supposition.”  Poeltl has since revised and edited, lengthened or shortened, these scenes, and added fresh stories and narratives to accompany them in their own multi-genre book: Waning Metaphorically.

Poeltl states in the Forward of his new collection: Life is a Metaphor. A metaphor is a symbol. A symbol is a sign. Watch for the signs. Like all stories, they can be watered-down to act as metaphor or parables; but unlike parables, metaphors can be interpreted differently, depending on the subject. A waning metaphor therefore, only sustains resolve if a person decides to recognize it.

So enjoy the instant gratification shorts offer in their ability to disclose the intimate secrets of a life or lives in not so many words.

Pick up your Pre-order Kindle Version today!