Fiction. Short Stories. Edited by Meg Pokrass and Gary Fincke with guest editor Amber Sparks. THE BEST MICROFICTION anthology series provides recognition for outstanding literary stories of 400 words or fewer. Co-edited by award-winning microfiction writer/editor Meg Pokrass, and Flannery O'Connor Prize-winning author Gary Fincke, the anthology features Amber Sparks serving as final judge, and one hundred and five of the world's best very short short stories. "This collection of micro-stories teems with energy and talent. To pick this up and read it is to feel the pulse of our world: the heartbreak, the strangeness, the vast variety of voices and desires, the coming of the future. This is exactly what I want to read." - Deb Olin Unferth , author of Barn 8 "I look forward to each year's Best Microfiction because it promises a view of life through a miniature, fractured lens. I'm enlivened by the odd shapes of these stories and the odd stories those shapes invite in, as if shopping in a Borgesian flea market. I'm reminded how the small, the quiet, tend to have the most interesting things to say." - Grant Faulkner , executive director of National Novel Writing Month "Amber Sparks' introduction is a gauntlet thrown down as she cites inspiration and bravery as the defining attributes of the brilliant stories in Best Microfiction 2021 . The pulse of these microfictions is operating at the speed of light, the fever a white heat of sound." - Pamela Painter , author of Fabrications "In only a few years, Best Microfiction has established itself as one of the most exciting anthologies of new fiction. If short stories are airplanes, the tiny miracles in this collection are hummingbirds." - James Tate Hill , author of Blind Man's Bluff and editor of Monkeybicycle THE BEST MICROFICTION anthology series provides recognition for outstanding literary stories of 400 words or fewer. Meg Pokrass, series editor, is the author of six flash fiction collections including THE DOG SEATED NEXT TO ME (Pelekinesis, 2019). Her work has been internationally anthologized in two Norton Anthology Readers, Best Small Fictions, 2018 and 2019, and has appeared in 350 literary magazines both online and in print. She received the Blue Light Book Award in 2016. She currently serves as Flash Challenge Editor at Mslexia Magazine, Festival Curator for Flash Fiction Festival, U.K. and Founding/Managing Editor of New Flash Fiction Review.