Flash Fiction America: 73 Very Short Stories

After years of reading Sherrie Flick’s short short stories in literary magazines across the country, it is a delight to see the best of them all together in her first collection, I Call This Flirting, winner of the Flume Press Chapbook Prize. The chapbook size is perfect for short shorts – the collection echoes the beautiful brevity of the form, yet Flirting also is plenty long enough for Flick to create an arc of mood and emotion that develops much like a novel. Initially, I’d say the theme of Flirting is love, but Flick’s stories are far from candy hearts and Valentines. Sometimes love is sweet, but more often love ends chewed up, spit out and ground into the sidewalk.

Sherrie Flick
(Flume Press, 2004)