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Flash fiction is a style of fictional literature or fiction of extreme brevity. There is no widely accepted definition of the length of the category. Some self-described markets for flash fiction impose caps as low as three hundred words, while others consider stories as long as a thousand words to be flash fiction.

Terms[link]

Other names for flash fiction include sudden fiction, microfiction, micro-story, short short, postcard fiction and short short story, though distinctions are sometimes drawn between some of these terms; for example, sometimes one-thousand words is considered the cut-off between "flash fiction" and the slightly longer short story "sudden fiction".

The term "flash fiction" may have originated from a 1992 anthology of that title As the editors said in their introduction, their definition of a "flash fiction" was a story that would fit on two facing pages of a typical digest-sized literary magazine..^[1]

History[link]

Very short fiction has roots going back to Aesop's Fables, and practitioners have included Saadi of Shiraz (The Gulistan), Bolesław Prus, Anton Chekhov, O. Henry, Franz Kafka, H.P. Lovecraft, Yasunari Kawabata, Ernest Hemingway, Julio Cortázar, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Fredric Brown.

Regarding short-short fiction, Hispanic literature has many authors, among the most famous, Augusto Monterroso (El dinosaurio), Luis Felipe Lomeli (El Emigrante), Alfredo Alamo, Santiago Eximeno and Jose Luis Zarate.

In France and in Francophone countries, the micronouvelles (short-short stories) today tend to be developed and popularized by authors such as Jacques Fuentealba, Vincent Bastin, Olivier Gechter, Stephane Bataillon and Laurent Berthiaume.^[2].

In German, the Kürzestgeschichten, influenced especially by brief narratives of Bertolt Brecht und Franz Kafka, include authors such as Peter Bichsel, Heimito von Doderer, Günter Kunert and Helmut Heißenbüttel.

Vignette[link]

Unlike a vignette, flash-fiction often contains the classic story elements: protagonist, conflict, obstacles or complications, and resolution. However, unlike a traditional short story, the limited word length often forces some of these elements to remain unwritten - that is, hinted at or implied in the written storyline. Different readers thus may have different interpretations of the flash fiction.

See also[link]

• Prose poetry
• Short story
• Fable
• Parable

References[link]

External links[link]

Look up flash fiction in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Flash What? A Quick Look at Flash Fiction by Jason Gurley

Richard Valentine Keane (14 February 1881 – 26 April 1946) was an Australian politician.

Keane was born in Beechworth, Victoria and, after his police constable father was transferred to Melbourne, was educated at Christian Brothers College, St Kilda. When he was 16 he took a position as a clerk in the Victorian Railways. In 1909 he married Ruby Thorne and they subsequently had a son and two daughters. From 1918 he was an office holder in the Victorian Railways Union, which became part of the Australian Railways Union (ARU) in 1920. He was General Secretary of the ARU from 1925 to 1929. His wife died in 1923 and he married Millicent Dunn in 1940.^[1]

Political career[link]

Keane was vice-president of the executive of the Victorian branch of the Australian Labor Party in 1928 and its president in 1930 and from 1937 to 1938. In 1925, he stood unsuccessfully for the Australian Senate and the Victorian Legislative Council. In the October 1929 election, he was elected as the member for Bendigo in the Australian House of Representatives, but lost it at the October 1931 election. He was narrowly defeated for Bendigo at the 1934 election, but was elected to the Senate at the 1937 election. He became leader of the government in the Senate in 1943.^[1]

In October 1941 Keane was appointed Minister for Trade and Customs and Vice-President of the Executive Council in the first Curtin Ministry and was responsible for administering wartime rationing and price controls. In 1946 he travelled to the United States to terminate Australia's Lend-Lease arrangements but died in Washington, D.C., survived by his wife, their daughter and the children of his first marriage.^[1]

Notes[link]