You Have Time For This

Contemporary American Short-Short Stories

Love, death, fantasy, and foreign lands, told with brevity and style by the best writers in the short-short fiction genre. You Have Time for This satiates your craving for fine literature without making a dent in your schedule. This collection takes the modern reader on fifty-three literary rides, each one only five hundred words or fewer. Mark Budman and Tom Hazuka, two of the top names in the genre, have compiled an anthology of mini-worlds that are as diverse as the authors who created them. Contributing writers include Steve Almond, author of My Life in Heavy Metal and Candy-freak; Aimee Bender, author of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt; Robert Boswell, author of five novels including Century’s Son; Alex Irvine, author of A Scattering of Jades; L. E. Leone who writes a weekly humorous column about food and life for the San Francisco Bay Guardian; Justine Musk, author of dark-fantasy novels including Blood Angel; Susan O’Neill, writer of nonfiction and fiction with a book of short stories Don’t Mean Nothing; Short Stories of Vietnam; Katharine Weber author of several novels, the most recent of which is Triangle. From Buddha to beer, sex to headless angels, there’s a story here for everyone. In You Have Time for This you will find:

• Flash fiction from forty-four authors
• Works from across the globe
• Highly regarded authors from all types of genres
• Fresh work from emerging writers
• Fifty-three stand alone pieces that tie the world together

Enjoy. You have time for this.

Praise for You Have Time for This

“A really good flash fiction is like a story overheard at a bar—personal, funny, dangerous, and sometimes hard to believe. You Have Time For This distills those qualities and many others into quick tall tales by writers who are as talented as they are magical.” — Kevin Sampsell, author of Beautiful Blemish and publisher at Future Tense Publishing

Media

PubWest Design Award

Review

“These contenders for the title of ‘world’s best short-short stories’ are by some of the best micro and flash writers I know of…suspense, revelation, a twist of metaphor, or plot, or character, and sometimes all, before you can turn the page? It’s like levitation—I’m skeptical, but seeing is believing.”

— Robert Shapard, co-editor of New Sudden Fiction and Flash Fiction Forward