Sudden Fiction Latino: Short-Short Stories from the United States and Latin America. Edited by Robert Shapard, James Thomas, and Ray Gonzales. 336 pages. W.W. Norton. $15.95.

1.

My vocation found me in the aisles of a church goods store. I was too young to appreciate the irony of crucifixes and other religious articles being on sale, stripped of sacramental power by their price tags and presence in bulk. At the same time, I was probably no more reverent than I was during family trips to the fabric store; in short, I was quickly bored. At some point during this particular excursion, I came across a framed picture of Jesus at floor level. If you stood at a certain point in relation to this image, the Lord’s eyes appeared closed, perhaps in agony, perhaps in the transport of destiny fulfilled. But with only the slightest shift in one’s angle of perception, the eyes would shoot open, a trick of design no doubt intended to evoke spiritual awakening, or the vigilance required of Christian living. I was not so perceptive as I later tearfully struggled to explain to my parents how the picture had somehow come to life.

2.

Brevity in narrative art is never a convenience. Attention spans may be waning, but this alone is not enough to explain the persistent appeal of the short-short story. In the Nineteenth Century, Baudelaire was blogging about the alienation of city life via the poetic vignettes of Paris Spleen. Had Facebook existed in Kafka’s time, we probably wouldn’t have classic shorts like “Before the Law” or “An Imperial Message”; Gregor Samsa would remain a harried salesman while his creator anxiously monitored the status of his friend requests.

3.

Steven Millhauser has argued that the miniature manifests a human urge for God-like control. The dollhouse, the Matchbox car, the paperweight globe—elements of the real reduced to objects of omniscient perusal, a big picture that can be taken in all at once. God is watching you.

4.

The miniature, for Millhauser, invites more, not less, scrutiny. If a miniature narrative moves us, it’s because of the density required to make a long story short. For this reason, the term flash fiction is a problematic genre designation, suggesting speed in its consumption (and composition). Not every short text invites close rereading or, for that matter, shrill fear for one’s sanity during a shopping trip to the local church goods store. The short-short story is viral, permeating the reader’s defenses—boredom, complacency, distraction—and replicating itself in images from the reader’s reality. Graffiti is an eyesore, even invisible, until you encounter it in Luis Alberto Urrea’s “The White Girl,” in which a train sends a tagger’s handiwork “to New York […] Mexico, to Japan in a container ship.” For a time long after we set the piece aside, Urrea’s brief narrative inhabits us; we are startled to attention whenever experience completes the partial vision glimpsed through this small fictional frame.

6.

By necessity, however, the spell can’t last. As Charles Baxter has pointed out, we eventually have to relinquish the fever dreams provoked by art, or else be paralyzed by sensitivities revealing the strangeness at every corner. And so we convalesce to Keyboard Cat, Llamas with Hats, Auto-Tune the News.

7.

Condensed fiction. Viral fiction. Narratives in miniature.

8.

Editors Robert Shapard, James Thomas, and Ray Gonzalez have chosen to designate their latest collection sudden fiction, which, to me, evokes without trivializing the compression essential to the form. Sudden Fiction Latino includes work by the well known (Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Luisa Valenzuela) and the emerging (Luna Calderón, Juan Martinez, Alicita Rodríguez).  I was lucky enough to be included among such a humbling array of writers, but what is most striking is the experience of reading so many different permutations of the same basic form. The short-short story—or whatever you might call it—continues to be reinvented to reflect any number of aesthetic, cultural, and historical perspectives. Far from defining the genre, this collection explores its inexhaustible possibilities.