Short Fiction
In this age of short attention spans when anything that doesn't fit onto a single screen is considered tediously protracted, "Flash Fiction" might bring readers back to short prose. But there are many types of short prose, some of which may merit greater attention. Here I'll try to disentangle a few of the types. Categorisation For a while the only category for short prose was "Prose Poem". The Prose Poem has been tried by many French poets. For the most part the pieces are (as Baudelaire described them) "poetic prose, without rhythm and without rhyme. ..". They are sometimes descriptive or anecdotal snapshots of a situation or event. More recently the form has been used in the US. When the genre was out of fashion authors who wanted their short texts published either had to make them fit the expectations of the poetic "prose poem" or, more often, add line-breaks and call their work a poem. Now that the term "Flash" has ...