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The Best of Brevity: Twenty Groundbreaking Years of Flash Nonfiction (Rose Metal Press)

How much of the human experience can fit into 750 words? A lot, it turns out. Since its founding in 1997, Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction has published hundreds of brief nonfiction essays by writers around the world, each within that strict word count. Over the past 20 years, Brevity has become one of the longest-running and most popular online literary publications, a journal readers regularly return to for insightful essays from skilled writers at every stage of their careers. Featuring examples of nonfiction forms such as memoir, narrative, lyric, braided, hermit crab, and hybrid, The Best of Brevity brings you 84 of the best-loved and most memorable reader favorites, collected in print for the first time. Compressed to their essence, these essays glint with drama, grief, love, and anger, as well as innumerable other lived intensities, resulting in an anthology that is as varied as it is unforgettable, leaving the reader transformed.

With contributions from Krys Malcolm Belc, Jenny Boully, Brian Doyle, Roxane Gay, Daisy Hernández, Michael Martone, Ander Monson, Patricia Park, Kristen Radtke, Diane Seuss, Abigail Thomas, Jia Tolentino, and so many more, The Best of Brevity offers unparalleled diversity of style, form, and perspective for those interested in reading, writing, or teaching the flash nonfiction form. 

Readers

Daisy Hernández is the author of the award-winning memoir A Cup of Water Under My Bed and coeditor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism. A contributing writer for the Buddhist magazine Tricycle, Daisy is an Assistant Professor in the Creative Writing Program at Miami University in Ohio.

Nicole Walker is the author of the collections The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet from Rose Metal Press and Sustainability: A Love Story from Mad Creek Books. Her previous nonfiction work includes Where the Tiny Things Are, Egg, Micrograms, Quench Your Thirst with Salt, and a book of poems This Noisy Egg. She wishes she'd gone with the original title for her collection of poems, "Comeuppance," so she only had one book with Egg in the title, but like eggs or chickens, the poetry collection came first. 

Ira Sukrungruang is the author of the memoirs Southside Buddhist, Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist Boy, and the forthcoming The Jade World, the short story collection The Melting Season, and the poetry collection In Thailand It Is Night. He is the coeditor of two anthologies on the topic of obesity: What Are You Looking At? The First Fat Fiction Anthology and Scoot Over, Skinny: The Fat Nonfiction Anthology. He is the recipient of the 2015 American Book Award, New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Nonfiction Literature, an Arts and Letters Fellowship, and the Emerging Writer Fellowship. His work has appeared in many literary journals, including Post Road, The Sun, and Creative Nonfiction. He is one of the founding editors of Sweet: A Literary Confection, and is the current Richard L. Thomas Chair and Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College.

Moderators

Zoë Bossiere, co-editor of The Best of Brevity: Twenty Groundbreaking Years of Flash Nonfiction, is a doctoral candidate at Ohio University, with a dual concentration in creative writing and rhetoric and composition. She is managing editor of Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction and a podcast host for the New Books Network’s Literature channel, where she interviews authors about their debut books of nonfiction. Her writing has been published in Guernica, The Rumpus, North Dakota Quarterly, and Essay Daily, among other places. Find her online at zoebossiere.com.

Dinty W. Moore, co-editor of The Best of Brevity: Twenty Groundbreaking Years of Flash Nonfiction, is author of the memoir Between Panic & Desire, winner of the Grub Street Nonfiction Book Prize, and is editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction, among many other books. Moore has published essays and stories in The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, Arts & Letters, and The Normal School and many other venues. He edits Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction and is deathly afraid of polar bears.