Brevity is the soul of wit, as William Shakespeare wrote in one of his longer plays, Hamlet. Flash Fiction, brief stories, have become one of the most exciting sub-genres of contemporary fiction. In This Will Only Take a Minute: Canadian Flash Fiction, Guernica Editions features short short stories by Canadian writers from six words to 500 words in length, short stories from across the entire spectrum of Canadian writing. and anything from stark realism to speculative fiction.
Bruce Meyer is author of more than sixty books of poetry, short fiction, non-fiction, literary journalism, and literary criticism. He has had two national bestsellers, The Golden Thread: A Reader's Journey Through the Great Books (2000) and Portraits of Canadian Authors (2016). He is twice winner of the E.J. Pratt Gold Medal and Prize for Poetry and the Gwendolyn MacEwen Prize for best poem. He was the inaugural Poet Laureate of the City of Barrie. He is professor of Poetry at Victoria College in the University of Toronto and professor of Creative Writing and Canadian Literature at Georgian College in Barrie.
The author of a clutch of novels, plays, film scripts and short story and poetry collections, Michael Mirolla describes his writing as a mix of magic realism, surrealism, speculative fiction and meta-fiction. Publications include three Bressani-prize winners: the novel Berlin (2012); the poetry collection The House on 14th Avenue (2014); and the short story collection, Lessons in Relationship Dyads (2016). His novella, The Last News Vendor, published in the fall of 2019, won the 2020 Hamilton Literary Arts Award for fiction. A speculative fiction collection, Paradise Island & Other Galaxies, appeared in the fall of 2020 and was longlisted for the ReLit Awards. A new poetry collection, At the End of the World was published in 2021. The short story, "A Theory of Discontinuous Existence," was selected for The Journey Prize Anthology; and both "The Sand Flea" and "Casebook: In The Matter of Father Dante Lazaro" are Pushcart Prize nominees. In the fall of 2019, Michael served a three-month writer's residency at the Historic Joy Kogawa House in Vancouver, during which time he finished the first draft of a 200,000-word novel, The Second Law of Thermodynamics. Born in Italy and raised in Montreal, Michael now makes his home in Hamilton.