Summer Reading at its Finest - Short Stories

Looking for that perfect read, be it at the beach, poolside, in the park under a shady oak or even on your commute? Short stories have you covered. Instant gratification while your sunbathing with your SPF 100. In an hour or within minutes, you could have lived an entire reality, been enchanted by an idea or fallen in love with a quote. Short stories are packed with prose and purpose. Because of their length, they replace the heavy descriptions of a novel with condensed scenes crafted to tell the same story with more umpf! If you appreciate less drivel and more drama, then you will find it in a short story. This includes flash fiction as well. Even Hemingway admitted the story he'd written which he'd loved the most was one sentence in length. "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." You live a lifetime of grief in this six word novel, but you also realize the parents have overcome their loss and moved on. It is an extreme example of a short story/flash fiction piece, but you understand what happened - and are given a beginning, middle and ending.

There is a lot of thought put into shorts in order to simplify, understanding they are not summaries of a larger work, they function as their own stories, created for the genre.

You can purchase short stories on their own or you can find compilations such as Waning Metaphorically which encompass several stories in multiple genres by one author. There are books of shorts with multiple authors as well available.

Don't let your summer escape without experiencing as many stories as possible. Look into short stories and squeeze a little more enjoyment out of your lazy summer days.

Not every story is meant to be a novel - read a Short Story.

Not every story is meant to be a novel, and with so many stories circling an author’s head at any given time, a short story is sometimes the best format in which to package it. Bang for your buck! Condensed story-telling.

This collection of shorts and flash fiction features fourteen multi-genre stories offering the reader a range of opportunities to slip away while on their commute, a day at the beach, or their lunch break. Short stories offer real-time entertainment in a world that demands instant gratification.

Waning Metaphorically is intended to excite the reader’s emotions and asks them to question, always. The stories within should inspire introspection on a number of topics and leave the reader more curious about their own points of view while, at times, agreeing with the authors.

It is recommended the stories are read in the order they are presented, but then, order is just another’s perception of how things ought to be.

Life is a Metaphor. A metaphor is a symbol. A symbol is a sign. Watch for the signs.

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!