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Literature Glossary

Don’t be an oxymoron. Know your literary terms.

Over 200 literary terms, Shmooped to perfection.

Flash Fiction

Definition:

Flash fiction has more aliases than Sean "Puff Daddy" Combs: micro fiction, sudden fiction, short-short stories… the list goes on and on.

So what is it? Flash fiction is a genre of fiction where all of the stories are very brief. We're talking under 100 words in some cases, although there's no agreed-upon length for what constitutes a flash fiction story. Some stories are a single sentence in length; others stretch on for a few hundred words.

Stoked to scope out some super-short stories? (It'll only take a minute. Literally.) Give SmokeLong Quarterly the once-over. It's one of the United States' first literary magazines dedicated to tiny tales.

Tags: General, Genre