Flash Fiction International
Page 17
Augusto Monterroso was an important figure in the Latin American “boom” generation; his story “Dinosaur” is said to have started the micro fiction movement. He received some of the highest literature and humanities awards in Guatemala, Mexico, and Spain. He died in 2003.
Ibrahim Muhawi is a renowned Palestinian social scientist and translator of many books, including (as coauthor) Speak Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales. He studied English literature at the University of California, Berkeley and was director of the master’s program in translation studies at the University of Edinburgh.
Edward Mullany is the author of If I Falter at the Gallows and Figures for an Apocalypse. He grew up in Australia and in the American Midwest.
Shabnam Nadiya grew up in Jahangirnagar, a small college campus in Bangladesh. She is a recent graduate of and a Schulze Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and is working on a collection of linked stories called Pariah Dog and Other Stories.
María Negroni has published two novels and several books of poetry, one of which won the Argentine National Book Award. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College since 1999 and is now directing the first creative writing program in Argentina.
Stefani Nellen is from Germany, but spent many years in the United States, and now lives in the Netherlands with her husband, a Dutchman. She is writing two novels, and her short stories have been published in various literary magazines; she won first prize in the Glimmer Train Fiction Open.
Kirk Nesset is the author of Paradise Road and Mr. Agreeable (fiction), as well as Saint X (poetry), Alphabet of the World (translation), and The Stories of Raymond Carver (nonfiction). His work has appeared in The Paris Review, The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, The American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, Witness, and Ploughshares.
James Norcliffe is a New Zealand poet who has also published short fiction, as well as several novels for young people, including the award-winning The Loblolly Boy (published in the United States as The Boy Who Could Fly).
Giannis Palavos was born in Velventos, Kozani in Greece in 1980. He studied journalism at Aristotle University in Thessaloniki and arts administration at the Panteion University in Athens. He is widely recognized as one of Greece’s best new writers. His short stories have won prizes from the British Council and Anagnostis magazine and most recently the Greek National Book Award.
Edmundo Paz Soldán is the author of fourteen books of fiction and winner of Bolivia’s National Book Award and the Juan Rulfo Award; he is also an essayist, journalist, translator, and coeditor with Alberto Fuguet of an anthology of new Latin American fiction, Se habla español. He teaches at Cornell University.
Petronius was a Roman consul in the time of Nero. The post of consul had little authority, but he was popular, according to the historian Tacitus, for his reckless freedom of speech. He is best known as the author of a satirical novel, The Satyricon, which was the basis of Fellini’s 1969 movie of the same name.
Virgilio Piñera was born in Cárdenas, Cuba, and died in Havana in 1979. His work includes several collections of stories, notably Cuentos frios (Cold Tales); his other works include essays on literature and literary criticism, numerous dramatic works, and three novels.
Robert Pinsky is the author of two translated books, The Inferno of Dante and The Separate Notebooks: Poems by Czeslaw Milosz. He has also published numerous collections of poetry as well as nonfiction books and was U.S. Poet Laureate from 1997 to 2000. He teaches in the graduate creative writing program at Boston University.
Meg Pokrass writes flash fiction, short stories, and poetry. Her first collection of flash fiction is Damn Sure Straight. Her work has appeared in many literary magazines; she is editor-at-large for BLIP Magazine (formerly Mississippi Review). She lives in San Francisco.
Lili Potpara, born in Maribor, Slovenia, is a writer and freelance translator. Her story collection Zgodbe na dusek (Bottoms Up Stories) won the best literary debut award at the 2002 Slovenian Book Fair. A mother of two, Lili holds a B.A. in French and English from the University of Ljubljana.
Shouhua Qi is the author of Red Guard Fantasies and Other Stories and When the Purple Mountain Burns; editor and translator of The Pearl Jacket and Other Stories: Flash Fiction from Contemporary China; and coauthor of Voices in Tragic Harmony: Essays on Thomas Hardy’s Fiction and Poetry. He came to the United States from China in 1989 and is a professor of English at Western Connecticut State University.
Qiu Xiaolong was born in Shanghai, China. He is a poet, literary translator, crime novelist, critic, and academic living in St. Louis, Missouri, with his wife and daughter. He originally visited the United States in 1988 to write a book about T. S. Eliot, but following the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 he was forced to remain in the United States to avoid persecution. His books have sold over a million copies and have been translated into twenty languages.
Shirani Rajapakse is a Sri Lankan poet and author whose work has appeared in many journals. Her collection of short stories, Breaking News, was shortlisted for the Gratiaen Prize.
Kristina Zdravič Reardon is a writer, translator, and doctoral candidate in comparative literary and cultural studies at the University of Connecticut. She holds an MFA in fiction writing from the University of New Hampshire and in 2010 was awarded a Fulbright grant to study translation in Slovenia.
Lesley Riva is the translator of Friendly Fire: The Remarkable Story of a Journalist Kidnapped in Iraq, Rescued by an Italian Secret Service Agent, and Shot by U.S. Forces. She is also the author of books and articles on interior design, food, travel, and family.
Bruce Holland Rogers is a writer and teacher whose stories have won a Pushcart Prize, Nebula, Bram Stoker, World Fantasy, and Micro Awards, and have been nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award and Spain’s Premio Ignotus. The short film The Other Side, directed by Mary Stuart Masterson, was based on his novelette, Lifeboat on a Burning Sea.
Ethel Rohan has two award-winning story collections, Goodnight Nobody and Cut Through the Bone. Her work has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, World Literature Today, Tin House Online, and the Irish Times. Raised in Ireland, she now lives in San Francisco.
Josephine Rowe is an Australian writer of short fiction, poetry, and essays. Her collections include How a Moth Becomes a Boat and Tarcutta Wake, and her stories have appeared in Meanjin, The Iowa Review, Harvard Review, and McSweeney’s. She is a 2014–16 Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University.
Eric Rugara is a young man in his twenties living in Nairobi, Kenya. Writing is his foremost passion. His influences have been Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Peter Abrahams, and Ernest Hemingway, to name a few. With this, his first major breakthrough, he hopes to begin a fruitful career in letters.
Juan José Saer was one of the most important Argentine writers of the last fifty years. He grew up in rural Argentina, and in 1968 moved to Paris, where he lived until his death in 2005. His body of work includes twelve novels, four collections of short stories, and one poetry collection; several of his stories have been made into movies.
Robert Scotellaro was born and raised in New York City and once played bongos onstage as Allen Ginsberg recited poetry. His stories and poems have appeared widely; he has published five chapbooks and a full-length book of flash fiction, Measuring the Distance. He now lives in San Francisco with his wife, his daughter, and his writing companion, a real cool dog named Addie.
Daryl Scroggins (see his story in Flash Theory) is the author of This Is Not the Way We Came In. His short stories have appeared in many magazines; his books are The Game of Kings and Winter Investments, a collection of short stories; his work Prairie Shapes, a Flash Novel, won the 2004 Robert J. DeMott Prose Contest. He lives in Marfa, Texas.
Gwen Shapard works for a nonprofit that teaches ESL and Spanish literacy to immigrants. She has degrees from Trinity University in San Antonio and the University of Texas at Austin.
H. J. Shepard writes poetry and short stories. Raised in Minnesota, she
is a historian of the American West. She lives in New York.
Ana María Shua is an award-winning Argentinean writer who is often referred to as “the Queen of the Microstory.” She has published over eighty books in numerous genres, and her stories appear in anthologies throughout the world. Several books of her short-short stories have been published in the United States recently, including Microfictions and Without a Net.
Katherine Silver is an award-winning translator of Spanish and Latin American literature and the codirector of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre. Her many translations include a collection of modern and contemporary Chilean fiction, as well as plays, screenplays for major motion pictures, and works of nonfiction.
Jethro Soutar is a Lisbon-based translator of Portuguese and Spanish. He has translated books for Bitter Lemon Press and And Other Stories, and recently cotranslated and edited The Football Crónicas.
Peter Stamm was born and raised in Switzerland. He studied in many fields, was an intern at a psychiatric clinic, and after living in New York, Paris, and Scandinavia became a writer and freelance journalist in Zurich. He has published numerous books of prose, as well as plays and radio dramas.
Steven J. Stewart has published books of translations of the work of Rafael Pérez Estrada (Spain), Fernando Iwasaki (Peru), and Ana María Shua (Argentina). He was awarded a 2005 Literature Fellowship for Translation by the National Endowment for the Arts and was a finalist for the 2005 PEN USA translation award.
Raymond Stock is an American writer, scholar, translator, musician, and actor who lived in Cairo for twenty years. Among his specialties are the Middle East and Arabic-English translation. He has translated seven books and numerous stories by Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz and is writing a biography of Mahfouz.
Ricardo Sumalavia, born in Lima, is a professor at the Catholic University of Peru and coordinator of its Center for Oriental Studies. He is the author of three story collections: Habitaciones (Rooms); Retratos familiares (Family Portraits); Enciclopedia mínima (Minimal Encyclopedia); and the novel Que la tierra te sea leve (May the Earth Lie Lightly Upon You). He teaches at the Université Michel de Montaigne, in Bordeaux, France.
Karina M. Szczurek was born in Poland, studied in Austria and Wales, and moved to South Africa in 2005. She is a writer, editor, and literary critic. Her first novel, Invisible Others, was published in 2014. She lives in Cape Town with her husband, André Brink.
Zakaria Tamer of Syria is one of the most important and widely read and translated short story writers in the Arab world. His works include twelve story collections. Many of his stories are flash length.
James Tate has many awards in poetry, including the William Carlos Williams Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Award. He also has several books of prose; his story “Farewell, I Love You, and Goodbye” comes from Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee: 44 Stories.
Penelope Todd has authored several novels, most for young adults (notably the Watermark trilogy), a bilingually written and published novel, Amigas, with Elena Bossi, and a memoir, Digging for Spain: A Writer’s Journey. She works as a writer and editor and is New Zealand’s first independent ebook publisher at Rosa Mira Books.
Anne Twitty writes, translates, and interprets in and in-between languages and traditions. She received the PEN Prize for Poetry in Translation in 2002 and an NEA translation grant in 2006. She is coauthor with Iraj Anvar of Say Nothing: Poems of Jalal al-Din Rumi.
Antonio Ungar, born in 1974, is the author of two short story collections and the novels Las orejas del lobo, shortlisted for the Courier International Prize for the best foreign book published in France in 2008, and Tres ataúdes blancos, winner of the Herralde Prize in 2010, shortlisted for the Rómulo Gallegos Prize in 2011 and translated into ten languages.
Karen Van Dyck teaches and directs Modern Greek Studies in the Classics Department at Columbia University. Her translations include The Rehearsal of Misunderstanding: Three Collections by Contemporary Greek Women Poets, The Scattered Papers of Penelope: New and Selected Poems by Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, and The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present.
Juan Villoro is the Mexican author of many books, including novels and short story collections. He has been well known within intellectual circles in Mexico, Latin America, and Spain for years, but his success among readers grew after he received the Herralde Prize for his novel El testigo.
Natasha Wimmer is an American translator of Spanish literature that includes Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 (which won the National Book Award and the PEN Translation Prize) and The Savage Detectives; and three novels by Mario Vargas Llosa.
Bess Winter grew up in Toronto and has lived in Kansas City; Victoria, British Columbia; Sackville, New Brunswick; and Bowling Green, Ohio. Her story “Signs” won a 2013 Pushcart Prize and the American Short(er) Fiction Award; others appear in Indiana Review, American Short Fiction, Versal, Berkeley Fiction Review, and Wigleaf. She is a Ph.D. student at the University of Cincinnati.
Sholeh Wolpé is a poet, literary translator, and fiction writer. Born in Iran, in her teen years she lived in Trinidad and the United Kingdom, before settling in the United States. Her work has won the Midwest Book Award and Lois Roth Persian Translation Prize, and has been translated into several languages.
Mohibullah Zegham was born in 1973 in Kabul, Afghanistan. He first wrote fiction in 2005 when he was working as a physician in Kajaki, a war-torn district of Helmand province in the south. A year later, his first collection of short stories was published by the PEN Society of Afghanistan. He now has ten books.
CREDITS
Sherman Alexie, “Idolatry,” from Blasphemy, copyright © 2012 by FallsApart Productions, Inc. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. and Scribe Publications. Any third-party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Electronic rights by permission of Nancy Stauffer Associates.
Édgar Omar Avilés, “Love,” as translated by Toshiya Kamei, is reprinted by permission of the author and translator.
Juan José Barrientos, “Labyrinth,” translated by Juan José Barrientos and Gwen Shapard. Reprinted by permission of the author, Juan José Barrientos.
Jensen Beach, “Family,” first published in Necessary Fiction (2009) and collected in For Out of the Heart Proceed (Dark Sky Books, 2012). Reprinted by permission of the author.
Ari Mikael Behn, “When a Dollar Was a Big Deal,” translated by Robert Ferguson. Copyright © Kolon Forlag, an imprint of Gyldendal Norsk Forlag AS. Translation © 2011 by Robert Ferguson. This translation was previously published in Best European Fiction 2013, edited by Aleksandar Hemon. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Dalkey Archive Press.
Roberto Bolaño, “Daniela,” translated by Chris Andrews, from The Secret of Evil, copyright © 2007 by the Heirs of Roberto Bolaño. Copyright © 2007 by Editorial Anagrama. Translation copyright © 2012 by Chris Andrews. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. and Pan Macmillan. Copyright © 2014 by the Heirs of Roberto Bolaño.
Elena Bossi, “The Ache,” translated by Georgia Birnie, from Slightly Peculiar Love Stories, edited by Penelope Todd (Rosa Mira Books, 2011). www.rosamirabooks.com. Reprinted by permission of Rosa Mira Books and Elena Bossi.
Juan Carlos Botero, “The Past,” translated by Jethro Soutar and Anne McLean. Reprinted by permission of the author and translators.
Ron Carlson, “Grief,” from Room Service: Poems, Meditations, Outcries & Remarks (Red Hen Press, 2012), was originally published in Mississippi Review. Copyright © 1996 by Ron Carlson. Used by permission of Brandt & Hochmann Literary Agents, Inc.
Chen Qiyou, “Butterfly Forever,” was originally published in The Pearl Jacket and Other Stories: Flash Fiction from Contemporary China. Translation copyright © 2008 by Shouhua Chi. Reprinted by permission of Stone Bridge Press.
Alberto Chimal, “The Waterfall,” translated by George Henson, from The Kenyon Review, Winter 2014. Reprinted by permission of the author and transl
ator.
James Claffey, “Skull of a Sheep,” first published in the New Orleans Review (2011) and collected in Blood a Cold Blue: Stories by James Claffey (Press 53, 2013). Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Jim Crace, “#36,” from The Devil’s Larder, copyright © 2001 by Jim Crace. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC and David Godwin Associates. Copyright © 2002 by Jim Crace. Our editor’s title, “Late for Dinner.”
Marco Denevi, “Lord of the Flies.” This translation by José Chaves was first published in The Café Irreal, no. 9, and is reprinted by permission of the translator.
Natalie Diaz, “The Gospel of Guy-No Horse,” from When My Brother Was an Aztec. Copyright © 2012 by Natalie Diaz. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.
Linh Dinh, “Man Carrying Books,” from Blood and Soap: Stories. Copyright © 2004 by Lihn Dinh. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc. on behalf of Seven Stories Press, www.sevenstories.com.
Brian Doyle, “The Hawk,” from The Sun, Feb. 2011, Issue 422, is reprinted by permission of the author.
Stuart Dybek, “Bruise,” from Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories, copyright © 2014 by Stuart Dybek. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC and International Creative Management, Partners. All rights reserved.
Berit Ellingsen, “Sovetskoye Shampanskoye,” published in Smokelong Quarterly, no. 33, is reprinted by permission of the author.
Tony Eprile, “The Interpreter for the Tribunal,” first appeared in Esquire online, Napkin Fiction, Feb. 20, 2007, and appears courtesy of the author. Copyright © 2007 by Tony Eprile. All rights belong solely to Tony Eprile and shall be his to dispose of as he sees fit.
Alex Epstein, “The Time Difference Between Poetry and Prose,” from Blue Has No South, translated by Becka Mara McKay (2010). Reprinted by permission of the publisher.