Robert Shapard’s exquisitely crafted short stories take readers to enchantingly peculiar realms: A young girl poignantly rejects immortality in favor of love. A startling revelation confronts a son who discovers his father's head is only burlap with piercing Marks-A-Lot eyes. A couple in their early 30s engage in sex role-play involving the destruction of Mars. A young woman valet parker at an all-night diner in Los Angeles is ensnared by the world's most famous monster. A boy's life is irrevocably altered by witnessing a Mexican family's farm-truck accident. An old, hungover science professor imparts the Earth's greatest secret to his students. The stories are not merely an escape into the surreal but also delve into the human experience. Interwoven throughout is the delicate balance between mortality and love, the intersection of reality and fantasy, the transformative power of unexpected events, and the perennial quest for meaning. The compelling and thought-provoking collection beckons readers to explore the depths of their own existence and embrace the extraordinary within the ordinary. "A spectrum of characters populates the prismatic flash in Bare Ana . Every story sings a surprise or a change of perspective.... [The prose] always slices clean, critical of uninvestigated motives, while deeply compassionate toward the vulnerable at heart.... Shapard's sensitive hand at intimacy makes his love stories a specialty. In the beautiful 'Aperçus,' lovers who've only known each other a month channel the concept of aperçu, instants of cosmic awareness for someone to consciously declare aloud: 'This is the meaning of my life.'"—Erin Vachon, Smokelong Quarterly "Readers might have high expectations of a book by such a renowned trailblazer in the flash form [who co-created and co-edited] the iconic W. W. Norton long-lived and long-loved flash anthology series. I believe readers will not be disappointed in Bare Ana . Nothing is predictable in these pages; the settings are vivid in ways you might not expect, and the characters face choices that will make your pulse race. I predict these stories will haunt you long after you've closed the book."—Myna Chang, Fractured Lit In a modern literary landscape of red notifications, pixilated text, and fast-scrolls, brevity is brilliance. Stories that have been razored to a honed edge—flash fiction, sudden fiction, short fiction—are like pebbles in a pond: they may be small, but they send out big ripples. They distill a moment, a scene, an expression, or a movement into a revelation about life and what it means to be human... oftentimes, under 1,000 words. In Bare Ana and Other Stories , Robert Shapard, the celebrated editor of flash and short fiction anthologies like Sudden Fiction and Flash Fiction International , shows he is not only a curator of these kinds of stories. He is a master crafter himself. With its kaleidoscope of short stories that deliver gut punches in the white gaps between words, it's no wonder Bare Ana won the 2022 W.S. Porter Prize. ... In one standout story, "The Gym," a gymnast's flawless, grueling routine goes unnoticed—met by cavernous quiet and a coach distracted by his phone. The story illuminates the isolation and disconnection of our tech-driven world, where attention to the beauty of the real moment is lost to screens, leaving its creators in solitude. With just this one powerful story, Shapard manages to convey all this complexity... in just 300 words. ... In "Turtle Creek," a group of young druggies' all-night bender is shattered by a violent accident, its aftermath painted with vivid imagery of flashing police lights and twisted metal (200 words). Between these sharp flashes, Shapard's longer stories breathe. "At the Back Door" explores the dangerous world of car repossession, revealing the toll it takes on the repossessor and inspired by Shapard's firsthand experience. ... Shapard also showcases how stories can explore genres typically associated with higher word counts. The title story, "Bare Ana," ventures into the speculative, sculpting a world where gene correction has done everything from erasing diabetes to assuring perfect teeth—and where "pre-nate tats" have become the norm, tattooing infants before birth. One man's young wife, whose mother never allowed her to be tattooed, must navigate being "bare" in a world where everyone's skin is etched and their identity tied to their tattoos. The soon-to-be parents struggle to decide if their child should do what everyone else does or be born natural and risk being ostracized. Bare Ana celebrates a story form that feels inherently modern but is also rooted in the fables and parables shaped throughout history. Aesop's tales and Zen kaons all distilled complex ideas into compact narratives. Anton Chekhov and Kate Chopin may have elevated the short story, and serials like "Sherlock Holmes" cut novels into digestible chunks, but it was the innovators like Jorge Luis Borges wh