Book Review: Brevity & Echo

Anthologies of short short fiction do exist, but the first publication from Brookline-based Rose Metal Press, Brevity & Echo, has a few things going for it that others don't:

(1) The reader gets an inadvertent sense of community, as all of the writers are Emerson College alumni.

(2) "READ SHORT, THINK LONG" -- which the Editors (Kathleen Rooney, who posts on the Ploughshares blog and just did an interview with Tao Lin, and Abigail Beckel) used as their m.o. in compiling the book, which I'll get to in a second, as it ties in with the

(3) quality of the writing. Slogging about the internet today, I stumbled across what seems to be a fair assessment of the faults of short shorts / microfiction / flash fiction / itty-bitty cutesy-wutesy story bumps (which will catch on as a name, mark my words):

After all, how can you express vision in 100 words? As for plot and character development, give those antiquated goods to Goodwill. All that matters with short shorts is a competent writing style and a desire for lots of publication credits.

How, indeed? And the book answers with the quote from 2, "READ SHORT, THINK LONG." That makes for stories dense with language and compression, like "The Custodian," the brilliant "How to Make Potato Salad," "Out of Africa," or "July," which I'll quote in its entirety:

When we get real bored, we ask Nipple (whose real name is Amanda, Sarah just started calling her Nipple one day because she heard it meant "idiot" in British slang), we ask her if we can smash the old television that her Mom's new boyfriend Tommy lugged to the curb earlier that day to make room for the new one they won off the radio, and she asks her Mom who says "sure," sipping a cheap beer, so we grab a baseball bat and a hammer and the five of us kick it and take turns swinging the tools; Ian's the one who finally cracks the glass in the front, and we're all cheering until a cop pulls up, silent, with the lights of his car flashing and asks us what we're doing, and none of us answer, but then he sees Nipple's Mom: in a bathing suit top and cut-offs, framed by the doorway, who yells "Oh, hey Jim!" and smiles, offering one of her cold beers to the uniformed man who greets her on the stoop with a wink, and soon enough he's following her inside to watch the game, and we're already bored with the broken television, now an electronic mess all over the shoulder of the road, so we throw the hammer back in the shed, but keep the baseball bat, and walk around looking for something else to break.

That's a very well written 234 words. The book's filled with plenty more like it.