Fiction comes in many forms, the novel, the novella and the short story. In Quiet Pine Trees (150 pages) T. R. Darling uses the form of micro fiction, with pieces often no longer than a paragraph. This results in stories that are whittled down to the absolute minimum but still hold an internal coherence...

In this volume, you will find more than five hundred examples and one very short story. Inside you will find stories of time travel, science fiction and fantasy. As each piece is designed to stand alone you could just dip in and out of the book, but the overall feeling is that the book also contains its coherence.

It reminded me a little of William Burroughs use of the cut-up technique, where you have to read the whole thing to construct its meaning in your mind and as lived experiences are different, there is no guarantee that readers won’t come to their conclusions of what the story means.

7

Charles Packer