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Fissures: One Hundred 100-Word Stories Paperback – May 1, 2015

by Grant Faulkner (Author)
5.0 5.0 out of 5 stars 11 ratings
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In Fissures, a collection of one hundred 100-word stories, Grant Faulkner uses the hard borders of the 100-word story form to evocatively capture the drama of the lacunae we live in, whether it's the gulf between a loved one, the natural world, or God.

"I've always thought life is more about what is unsaid than what is said," he says. "We live in odd gaps of silence, irremediable interstices that sometimes last forever. A lingering glance averted. The lover who slams the door and runs away. Unsent letters."

Faulkner, the executive director of National Novel Writing Month and the co-founder of the lit mag 100 Word Story, has focused on longer narrative forms for most of his writing career. He wondered, however, if instead of building an entire world with text--to sew connections, to explain--he did the opposite.

"What if instead of relying on the words of a story, I relied on the spectral spaces around those words? What if I privileged excision over any notion of comprehensiveness, and formed narratives around caesuras and crevices?"

"Fissures is disjunction at its most disruptive," says Pamela Painter, author of Wouldn't You Like to Know. "Faulkner's stories are 'spectral spaces' captured with 'hard borders' and his dangerous eye for truth."

Two stories in Fissures, "The Toad" and "Way Station", were chosen for Best Small Fictions 2016, judged by Stuart Dybeck.
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  1. Print length
    122 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Press 53
  4. Publication date
    May 1, 2015
  5. Dimensions
    5.25 x 0.29 x 8 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    1941209203
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1941209202
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"In Grant Faulkner's collection of very short fiction, Fissures, Faulkner manages to elevate his language, presenting each word here with the rhetorical weight of a novel and with a poetic aptitude that is anything but self-indulgent. Faulkner has, instead, carefully crafted these stories, and each word comes at the reader as high currency." - Atticus Review

"Every detail, in this terse form, seems telling, radiating a mysterious significance. Much like other restricted forms--haiku came to mind more than once, in reading this book--syntax is folded in upon itself, words standing alone like miniature paintings." - decomP

"Using such poetic techniques as compression, ambiguity, and vivid imagery ('I was the kid with mangy ears and biscuits sopped in syrup'), the author tells large stories within tiny spaces: in fact, when writing Fissures he focused on the spaces themselves, those 'odd gaps of silence' that can translate into distances and disconnections between loved ones." - KYSO Flash

"These ephemeral works are meditative like well-crafted haiku. And much like a well-crafted haiku, they are not a simple formal exercise. We sense the expanse between the characters." - Your Impossible Voice

"The stories read as breaths, as whispers, as reflections in glass." - Puerto del Sol

From the Author

I've always thought life is more about what is unsaid than what is said. We live in odd gaps of silence, irremediable interstices that sometimes last forever. A lingering glance averted. The lover who slams the door and runs away. Unsent letters. We all carry so many strange little moments within us. Memory shuffles through random snapshots. Sometimes they seem insignificant, yet they stay with us for some reason, weaving the fabrics of our beings. In the end, we don't seize the day so much as it seizes us.

The idea of capturing such small but telling moments of life is what drew me to 100-word stories (or "drabbles" as they're sometimes referred to). I'd previously written novels and longer short stories, forms that demanded an accumulation of words--to sew connections, to explain, to build an entire world with text. I wondered, what if I did the opposite? What if instead of relying on the words of a story, I relied on the spectral spaces around those words? What if I privileged excision over any notion of comprehensiveness, and formed narratives around caesuras and crevices?

We live as foragers in many ways, after all, sniffing at hints, interpreting the tones of a person's voice, scrutinizing expressions, and then trying to put it all together into a collage of what we like to call truth. Whether it's the gulf between a loved one, the natural world, or God, we exist in lacunae. I wanted to write with an aesthetic that captured these "fissures," as I began to think about them.

Perhaps I could have accomplished such an aesthetic of writing in a longer form, but the hard borders of a 100-word story put a necessary pressure on each word, each sentence. In my initial forays into 100-word stories, my stories veered toward 150 words or more. I didn't see ways to cut or compress. I didn't see ways to make the nuances and gestures of language invite the reader in to create the story. But writing within the fixed lens of 100 words required me to discipline myself stringently. I had to question each word, to reckon with Flaubert's mot juste in a way that even most flash fiction doesn't. As result, I discovered those mysterious, telling gaps that words tend to cover up.

We all have a literal blind spot in our eyes, where the optic nerve connects to the retina and there are no light-detecting cells. None of us will ever know the whole story, in other words. We can only collect a bag full of shards and try to piece them together. This collection is my bag full of shards.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Press 53 (May 1, 2015)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 122 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1941209203
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1941209202
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 5.1 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.25 x 0.29 x 8 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    5.0 5.0 out of 5 stars 11 ratings

About the author

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Grant Faulkner

Grant Faulkner

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As a boy, I spent my allowance on all sorts of pens and paper, so there was never much question I would become a writer. I received my B.A. from Grinnell College in English and my M.A. in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University.

It seems like I should have other degrees, such as an MFA in Novels about People Doing Nothing But Walking Around, a PhD in Collages and Doodles and Stick Drawings of Fruitless Pursuits, or a Knighthood in Insomniac Studies, but I don't.

My essays on creativity have been published in The New York Times, Poets & Writers, Writer’s Digest, and The Writer. My short stories have appeared in dozens of literary magazines, including Tin House, The Southwest Review, and Puerto del Sol. My stories have also been included in Best Small Fictions 2016 and in the upcoming Norton anthology New Microfiction.

My collection of one hundred 100-word stories, Fissures, came out in 2015 with Press 53, and Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo was published by Chronicle Books in 2017.

I'm also the executive director of National Novel Writing Month, co-founder of the lit journal 100 Word Story, and co-founder of the Flash Fiction Collective.

Oh, and I've presented at such shindigs as the Frankfurt Book Fair, the Chicago Humanities Festival, the Associated Writing Programs Conference, Book Expo America, the Oakland Book Festival, the Bay Area Book Festival, the San Francisco Writers Conference, the Commonwealth Club, the Digital Publishing Innovation Summit, Writers Digest West, and LitQuake.

Customer reviews

5 out of 5 stars
5 out of 5
11 global ratings
Flash Fiction
5 Stars
Flash Fiction
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_fictionThis genre fits internet content space criteria very well and may become the international standard of prose fiction with punch. In addition, it is rapidly becoming the model for news reportage.
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Top reviews from the United States

Lynn Jacobs
5.0 out of 5 stars A rich and subtly connected collection of stories
Reviewed in the United States on June 16, 2015
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Anytime you begin to read a story you enter into a contract with the author. The author promises something that creates meaning, an understanding between you and him or her. You promise to give him or her a chance to make the connections that will create story. The 100 Word Story is a genre that insists on active participation by the reader, and in return it promises vivid active language, each word carefully chosen to enable vivid imagining on your part. You must pay careful attention and even reread each story as it builds itself in your mind. Each time you read it, you find a different nuance of meaning that perhaps you missed the first time. It could be that you construe the meaning in a different way each time you read it. This is not a genre that permits passive or sleepy reading. It is over too quickly, like a one horse town that flies by if you blink at the wrong moment. It is rich and provocative and multi-layered. Grant Faulkner is a master of this genre. "Fissures" is a rich and addictive collection of stories that are subtly linked while at the same time each stands alone. Highly recommended!
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James Thomas
5.0 out of 5 stars The Joy of Living Dangerously
Reviewed in the United States on July 20, 2015
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Like an earthquake addict living on a fault line, I find myself going back to Fissures again and again. This book is seismic. Here, with these hundred aftershocks of tight little stories, a tectonic plate of solid fiction is exposed--an accumulation of characters bound together and surfacing in their conflicted situations. Meet Celeste and Gerard, popping up, getting it on, dropping out, and splitting up. Ending it all, but differently each time. Or encounter the inset saga of Alexander the filmmaker, trying but failing to get his life right in eight takes. There is danger in these pages, to be sure, but it is peril experienced through a series of sharp revelations, each positively embracing human nature on the fearless edge. I keep returning to these people and their lives, trying to learn more, reaching into the crevices, taking their risks and my chances--and enjoying the ride. Again and again. A hundred times.
2 people found this helpful
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Doug
5.0 out of 5 stars I thoroughly enjoyed this book
Reviewed in the United States on June 4, 2015
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I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The author manages a great deal in just 100 words, setting scenes, developing complex characters, providing satisfying shards of narrative and dialogue, and then surprising the reader with a sentence that seems to capture and even extend the story. The pieces combine the compression of poetry with the narrative flow of fiction. I would recommend to anyone interested in short fiction or poetry.
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chi lady
5.0 out of 5 stars The power of a good writer
Reviewed in the United States on April 30, 2015
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the author uses flash prose - each "story" is only 100 words. The stories vary - some I love, some don't reach me and some I didn't understand. It is a real treat to read these pieces - poetry in prose. It is amazing when a story clicks that it can reach the reader in so few words. The power of a good writer.
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Dedicated reader Mark
5.0 out of 5 stars Wisdom, humor, life in 100 words
Reviewed in the United States on December 9, 2015
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It’s Faulkner’s sentences that make the stories and it’s his inventive metaphors, similes and his succinct philosophical observations that make the sentences. This imaginative flash fiction collection will have you rereading, pondering and admiring these delicately crafted vignettes or “strange moments,” as he calls them in the introduction.
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Samuel J. Snoek-Brown
5.0 out of 5 stars Grant Faulkner is a conjurer.
Reviewed in the United States on May 28, 2015
Grant Faulkner is a conjurer. He waves his hands over a page, a few dozen words fall, and from them whole lives echo, small and tinny but going on for hours.

You ask most folks in the know what distinguishes a prose poem from flash fiction -- especially microfiction like these tiny 100-word stories -- and they'll tell you, not much. And truth be told, some of these pieces in fissures do feel a bit more like poetry, or old-fashioned sketches, or vignettes, or disembodied scenes. But that doesn't deprive any of them of their immense power, and even in such impressionistic brevity, most of these stories are true stories, whole narratives tossed on the page with the minimum strokes of a pen, like some Japanese painting.

It helps that so many of the stories are connected -- I look forward to rereading this whole book and piecing together the longer narrative of Gerard and Celeste, or of Zabeth. And of course there is the central eight-story cycle of Alexander, the filmmaker.

But really, there is equal magic in the isolated, momentary lives of Stockton and Sophie postcoital on a Victorian couch, of Tom and his father in the silver LTD, of Margery and George drinking martinis in jelly jars, of all the nameless "I" narrators and "you" subjects and hes and shes of these intimate little worlds.

It's quite a feat, this book, and it serves not only as a beautiful artifact of the microfiction form but also as a kind of textbook. If ever you wanted to know how to write a full story in a mere 100 words, here are your instructions: take up Grant Faulkner, read, and read again.
2 people found this helpful
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Astute
5.0 out of 5 stars Flash Fiction
Reviewed in the United States on September 2, 2015
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_fiction

This genre fits internet content space criteria very well and may become the international standard of prose fiction with punch. In addition, it is rapidly becoming the model for news reportage.
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Astute
5.0 out of 5 stars Flash Fiction
Reviewed in the United States on September 2, 2015
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_fiction

This genre fits internet content space criteria very well and may become the international standard of prose fiction with punch. In addition, it is rapidly becoming the model for news reportage.
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Serena S.
5.0 out of 5 stars Master of Micro
Reviewed in the United States on February 9, 2016
Grant Faulkner is a master of micro fiction. Read his work to learn about life through his invented characters and about writing within the confines of 100 words.
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Top reviews from other countries

Dr Ashley Chantler
5.0 out of 5 stars A Ton of Brilliance
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 9, 2015
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100 gems. Grant Faulkner is a master of the drabble.

Ashley Chantler, co-editor, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine.
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