In Rift, stories by Kathy Fish and Robert Vaughan, published in 2015 by Unknown Press, lovers of flash fiction have a new Must Read, a new entry to the list of flash fiction classics that show the power and depth possible in stories compressed into a page or two.
Even the one-word, four-letter title conveys more than the sum of its parts. As a noun, rift means a break in something. A crack. A split. A flaw. A breach. A fracture. A cavity. An opening. A serious division in friendly relations.
The book Rift contains four escalating sections: Fault, Tremor, Breach, and Cataclysm. Each section has around eighteen stories that alternate between writers.
The table of contents is the only place Read in Full
First, to say: choosing the winners was difficult! Going from longlist to shortlist was a matter of what grabbed me on first read, whether it was the story, the freshness of the language, the structure, or something unique and surprising that I’d never seen before. But the next stage is when I got tough, because I was actively looking for reasons not to pick stories. I had to get to my top 5 from 20. This is when a judge gets ruthless. A story has to give something back on a second read – and a third read! Any even slight laziness in language – an overused phrase bordering on cliche, a typo – and that made it far more likely that I would discard that story. Also, if the premise was great, an intriguing idea, but the follow-through and the ending just didn’t do it for me, that landed the story in my No pile.