SOURCE: Shapard, Robert. Introduction to Sudden Fiction: American Short Stories, edited by Robert Shapard and James Thomas, pp. xiii-xvi. Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1986.

In the following essay, Shapard chronicles the difficulty in naming Sudden Fiction, citing the novelty and distinctiveness of the short-short story genre.

All the works in this collection are from one to five pages long, and all are by American authors. A few are familiar, but the great majority have been published within the last five years.

Because they are so new, and sometimes so unlike the modern notion of story, it was by no means clear at the outset exactly what to call these works. Short-short stories? Fictions? Or something else entirely? Almost nothing has been said about them yet by literary critics, so we asked the editors who publish them, and especially the writers who write them, What are these things...