Praise for Fissures: One Hundred 100-Word Stories

Fissures is disjunction at its most disruptive—Faulkner’s stories are “spectral spaces” captured with “hard borders” and his dangerous eye for truth.

—Pamela Painter, author of Wouldn't You Like to Know

Grant Faulkner’s stories are poetic and creepy and funny and touching and you’re going to have a swell time. I wish I had written some of them.

—Lou Beach, author of 420 Characters

Grant Faulkner is the impresario of 100-word stories. The 100 tantalizing fictions in Fissures shock and please—a precious pile of sparkling surprises.

—Jane Ciabattari, author of Stealing the Fire and California Stories

Grant Faulkner’s sharply observed, darkly funny, heart-breaking bursts of highly compressed prose offers a startling view of what reality might look like through a funhouse microscope.  Fissures pushes the boundaries of flash prose, and thank goodness for that. Sometimes less is so much more.

—Dinty W. Moore, author of Dear Mister Essay Writer Guy: Advice and Confessions on Writing, Love, and Cannibals

Reviews & Interviews

Fiction Southeast (Interview)

“I’m interested in creating longer forms through a flash aesthetic. I like narratives that move through images and moments rather than the connective tissue of a grand narrative arc.”

Superstition Review (Interview) 

“Interestingly enough, the story is always much better by the time I get it to exactly 100 words.”

Atticus Review (Review)

“While the very short form tends to work best on computer screens, there’s something more intimate at work here in the printed medium. Faulkner has composed stories that are dark, mysterious and, at times, hilarious.”

Writer’s Digest, “Naked (On the Page) and Afraid”: July/August 2015 print issue.

"Good writing requires courage--first to give voice to the truth at the heart of every story, and then to share it with a world of readers."

Puerto del Sol (Review)

Faulkner has given us a book as much poetry as much as it is fiction, and imagery so sharp you can almost feel its corners jutting off the page . . . . The brevity of each story is tantalizing. The stories read as breaths, as whispers, as reflections in glass.

About the Author

Grant Faulkner likes big stories and small stories. He is the Executive Director of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and the co-founder of 100 Word Story. His stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Poets & Writers, Writer’s Digest, The Southwest Review, PANK, Gargoyle, eclectica, Puerto del Sol, the Berkeley Fiction Review, and Word Riot, among many others. He lives in Berkeley with a family of writers and a dog that insists on sitting on his lap each morning when he writes.

Visit Grant's website to find his essays on writing flash fiction, published in Poets & Writers, Writer's Digest, Brevity, The Rumpus, and other fine magazines on writing and the writing life.