Reading Time: 8 minutes If you want to write a flash where a character sits and ruminates, then there must be a reason for them to sit, for them to be lost in their own memories. There are time, even in flash, with it’s limited space, where characters can pause, can delve into thought and feelings, but without a balance between rumination and action, a story can feel static, can feel like it’s headed nowhere. There’s a fine line between exposition and context, and […] The post How to Sit: Banishing the static in Flash Fiction, by Tommy Dean appeared first on TSS Publishing ..read more

Reading Time: 2 minutes The train smells of old chips and coffee grounds. God, I could murder an Americano and a brownie bite. I spend far too much at Pret. Should eat more fruit, at least an apple once in a blue moon. * His hand on your waist as you dance, twirling you away, then back into his arms. Vodka-slackened, your limbs float weightless in the mirrorball light. * That woman seriously shouldn’t wear those trousers. Not judging, but if she could see […] The post The Things We Tell Ourselves To Try To Stop Thinking About The Things We Don’t Want To Think About, By Fiona J. Mackintosh appe ..read more

Reading Time: 11 minutes The phials have had long enough in the machine. Our new guest lying silent on the steel table between us, I start the checklists while Petros watches the monitor fill with graphs. Not on anything then? It’s a routine check: you’d be surprised how many are. Even respectable types. It’s a wonder anyone survives crossing the street. I run through the standard questions. Alcohol? Maybe later – I’m a little busy? You know what I meant… Nah, no trace. And […] The post Not Even a London Bus, by Dave Wakely appeared first on TSS Publishing ..read more

Reading Time: 8 minutes Inhabiting the body can be a strange, unsettling thing, especially when it goes wrong. But how do we encapsulate this experience effectively in stories? The absurdist author George Saunders believes that ‘an aesthetic uncoupling from the actual’ may be necessary in fiction to ‘express our most profound experiences’ (cited in Lovell’s Introduction to Saunders’ The Tenth of December, 2013, p.xviii). Saunders’ point is relevant to writing about the disorientation of physical and mental illness. Here, speculative or fabulous narratives may […] The post Let Them Float: Illne ..read more

Reading Time: 4 minutes Something you cannot tell about violins, when you see one radiant in a museum cabinet or singing under the soloist’s touch, is that they are held together by pure tension. Many parts of the instrument are kept in place by nothing more than pressure and tightness. If there are too many small imbalances, it can pull itself to pieces. When you put on new strings, you have to replace them one by one, not remove them all at once. This […] The post Equipoise, by Alice Ahearn appeared first on TSS Publishing ..read more

I knew where we were heading. It was a canyon. A canyon in northern Arizona. I was told that its name was Antelope Canyon. We were on the bus with the AC on and my hands and feet were ice-cold. There was the strange, unpleasant smell of buses and I felt sick from the way the vehicle shook from side to side. On my left, the window was blurred by the reddish dirt; I peeped out through the thick curtain […] The post A Beautiful Encounter with Antelope Canyon, by Ruochen Liu appeared first on TSS Publishing ..read more

There was a light drizzle on the day I landed in Yunnan, and the air was so soft  walking in it was like being gently wrapped in a cool velvet blanket. It was unlike Chengdu, my home city. Chengdu was damp, but to spend a winter in Chengdu is like staying in a small, fully air-conditioned room with  moisturiser on. So, a curious seven-year-old as I was, I immediately decided that I liked the place. There were stone-paved streets all over […] The post Chasing Clouds by Li Qingxiao appeared first on TSS Publishing ..read more

We interviewed Giselle Leeb about her literary-fantastical, genre-bending debut collection, Mammals, I Think We Are Called. Buy Mammals, I Think We Are Called at: Playlist – skip to a topic 00.00: Intro. Themes: apes, the environment, outsiders, the twenty-first century, and the fantastic. 00.40: Apes 3.27: Doctors. 5.14: Barleycorn (story) – folk horror comes to the city. Transition from realism to surrealism. Environmentalism and climate change, Theory versus action and fiction. 11.00: Thrutopia (the middle way between Utopia and Dystopia). […] The post Interview: Mammals, I Think We Are Cal ..read more

Review by Becky Tipper Publisher: Postbox Press (an imprint of Red Squirrel Press) (2022) 138 pages Price: £8.99 ISBN: 978 1913632 342 The lyrical short stories in Emma Timpany’s Three Roads span time and space – they take place in the UK, France, Australia, and in the author’s native New Zealand/Aotearoa, and unfold in both the present and in the remembered past. These are stories about place and memory and the fragile strangeness of human connections. The collection’s title comes […] The post SHORT STORY REVIEW: ‘THREE ROADS’ BY EMMA TIMPANY first appeared on TSS Publishing ..read more

Review by Asha Krishna Publisher: Alien Buddha Press 149 pages RRP: £8.05 ISBN: 9798458074070 Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar is an Indian-American writer, whose work has been nominated multiple times for Pushcart and Best of the Net awards. Her debut flash collection Morsels of Purple with its exotic sounding title immediately draws attention. It is a testimony to Sara’s simplistic style and precision when she explains why she chose the title; in an interview with Helen Rye for Smokelong Quarterly, Sara says […] The post FLASH FICTION REVIEW: ‘MORSELS OF PURPLE’ BY SARA SIDDIQUI CHANSARKAR first app ..read more