📚Quick Reads. @SueBavey Reviews Fast Fiction: 101 Stories, 101 Words Each by @ScottyCornfield for Rosie’s #Bookreview Team #RBRT

Today’s team review is from Sue.

Sue blogs here https://suelbavey.wordpress.com/

Rosie’s Book Review Team

Sue has been reading Fast Fiction by Scotty Cornfield

Fast Fiction intrigued me due to its challenging premise. It is an anthology of 101 stories, each
with only 101 words. Keeping to such a strict exact word count is incredibly difficult and my
interest was piqued. The idea originated with a daily prompt given by the Monterey County
Weekly, which the author has been undertaking for years now. He writes the prompt at the end
of each story so you can see what inspired each one, which was a nice touch.

Naturally some of the stories are better than others. Some have clever puns and unexpected
twists in the final few words. These were the ones I enjoyed the most. My favourite was Close
Encounter with a Celebrity which had a fabulous twist. I also really liked Surgically Removed,
where a medical scene was not what it first appeared to be, They Think They Know Us So Well,
which is written from a dog’s perspective discussing humans with his pals and Lessons From a
Grim Reaper, where one of the harbingers of death decides to rebrand himself. As you can
see, the stories are very varied in their content.

These stories are so short a few can be read while having a tea break. They do not require
much brain power, which was ideal, since I read them while sick with COVID when my attention
span was not its best! What they are is fun and cleverly thought through. If you can think up a
prompt of your own the author states he will happily include it in a future volume and credit you.

Book description

In FAST FICTION, you’ll enter a cafe where the menu is loaded with nothing but literary appetizers, designed to be quickly consumed and easily digested. You’ll meet people with secrets and others who wished they knew how to keep them; characters looking to exact revenge and others getting their just desserts when karma calls. Fans of the combo platter will see it all here, from the dark to the darkly comical; the laugh-out-loud funny to the thought-provoking; offering more twists and turns than a pretzel—more ups and downs than a soufflé.
 
Like the world of improv, each tale has been inspired by a prompt (a single word or a phrase) provided by readers. From those simple suggestions, the stories evolve. You’ll meet people from all walks of life, but they’ll all have at least one thing in common: Your brief encounter with them will be over in less than a minute. Welcome to FAST FICTION,where you’ll find 101 stories of exactly 101 words each. How’s that for symmetry?

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📚A Collection Of Flash-Fiction. Jenni Reviews Fast Fiction: 101 Stories, 101 Words Each by @ScottyCornfield for Rosie’s #Bookreview Team #RBRT

Today’s team review is from Jenni.

Find out more about Jenni here https://jenniferdebie.com/

Rosie’s Book Review Team

Jenni has been reading Fast Fiction: 101 Stories, 101 Words Each by Scotty Cornfield.

The title of Scotty Cornfield’s first collection, Fast Fiction: 101 Stories, 101 Words Each, really says it all. This is a collection of 101 microfictions, each purportedly exactly 101 words long (even I’m not diligent enough to check all of them, but Cornfield says they are and he seems like an honest lad), and all traversing the vast sea of topics that can be covered in that small span of letters and lines.

Mircofiction, flash fiction, the shortest of short stories, can be among the punchiest fiction out there, and yet it can be difficult to find printed collections like this. Most publishers want some thematic cohesion, a through line, in the short story collections they put out, whereas flash fiction, by nature of the beast and volume of the stories that have to be produced to put enough pages together for a meaty collection, is not going to have that cohesion. It is form that thrives on web forums and in writing workshops, not necessarily one that you see frequently in print, and yet here Cornfield is, obviously in love with the genre and, apparently, planning at least one more volume of stories, given the fact that this Fast Fiction has “Volume One” stamped at the top of the cover in red.

It is heartening to see. For those of us who appreciate brevity, and the ability to grind in to the absolute yolk of a story, a scene, a moment in time, flash fiction is an artform worth celebrating. And Cornfield does celebrate it, with stories of joy and heartbreak and mystery, stories of random happenstance and brutal miscalculation, with all that is and can be weird and wonderful in writing.

I must admit, as an editor, that there are places where I wonder if Cornfield is a little too confined by his 101-word edict. Places where the story would be served by cutting a phrase here, a line there, and thus become a 95-word story, and just the little bit tighter for it, but that is nitpicking at its finest. Overall, Cornfield’s work is sound, punchy, and fun in all the ways you want flash fiction to be. Look for particular standouts “I’m a Good Neighbor”, “He Made Work a Four-Letter Word”, and “Lessons from a Grim Reaper” for some of this reviewer’s particular favorites.

4 stars.

Book description

In FAST FICTION, you’ll enter a cafe where the menu is loaded with nothing but literary appetizers, designed to be quickly consumed and easily digested. You’ll meet people with secrets and others who wished they knew how to keep them; characters looking to exact revenge and others getting their just desserts when karma calls. Fans of the combo platter will see it all here, from the dark to the darkly comical; the laugh-out-loud funny to the thought-provoking; offering more twists and turns than a pretzel—more ups and downs than a soufflé.
 
Like the world of improv, each tale has been inspired by a prompt (a single word or a phrase) provided by readers. From those simple suggestions, the stories evolve. You’ll meet people from all walks of life, but they’ll all have at least one thing in common: Your brief encounter with them will be over in less than a minute. Welcome to FAST FICTION,where you’ll find 101 stories of exactly 101 words each. How’s that for symmetry?

AmazonUK | AmazonUS

📚101 Stories 101 Words Each. @GeorgiaRoseBook Reviews Fast Fiction by @ScottyCornfield for Rosie’s #Bookreview Team #RBRT #BookTwitter

Today’s team review is from Georgia.

Georgia blogs here https://www.georgiarosebooks.com

Rosie’s Book Review Team

Georgia has been reading Fast Fiction by Scotty Cornfield

It takes a certain dedication, and discipline, to commit to writing a 101-word story every day for several years but this is exactly what Scotty Cornfield has done. He works from a prompt, which in this book he puts at the end of each story.

As I’ve attempted to write flash fiction, I know how difficult it can be so I am in admiration of Cornfield’s output and his ability to come up with as many and varied stories as he does. Some of the prompts were straight-forward, some were words I’d never heard before.

These are interesting and entertaining tales for anyone but if you have concentration issues or little time to indulge in reading then they are ideal as you can read a complete story in a minute. You can then leave it there or if you’re like me be unable to stop turning the pages to see what comes next.

There were obviously some stories I preferred over others but on the whole, this is a solid collection of entertainment which I recommend to anyone who enjoys fast fiction.

What I also liked is that you can contact him with your own prompt and get a credit when he writes it. Nice touch.

Book description

In FAST FICTION, you’ll enter a cafe where the menu is loaded with nothing but literary appetizers, designed to be quickly consumed and easily digested. You’ll meet people with secrets and others who wished they knew how to keep them; characters looking to exact revenge and others getting their just desserts when karma calls. Fans of the combo platter will see it all here, from the dark to the darkly comical; the laugh-out-loud funny to the thought-provoking; offering more twists and turns than a pretzel—more ups and downs than a soufflé.
 
Like the world of improv, each tale has been inspired by a prompt (a single word or a phrase) provided by readers. From those simple suggestions, the stories evolve. You’ll meet people from all walks of life, but they’ll all have at least one thing in common: Your brief encounter with them will be over in less than a minute. Welcome to FAST FICTION,where you’ll find 101 stories of exactly 101 words each. How’s that for symmetry?

AmazonUK | AmazonUS