Fissures

About Fissures: One Hundred 100-word Stories

In Fissures, a collection of one hundred 100-word stories, Grant Faulkner uses the fixed compositional lens of the 100-word story form to evocatively capture the drama of the lacunae we live in, whether it’s the gulf between a loved one, the natural world, or God.

“I’ve always thought life is more about what is unsaid than what is said,” he says. “We live in odd gaps of silence, irremediable interstices that sometimes last forever. A lingering glance averted. The lover who slams the door and runs away. Unsent letters.”

Faulkner, the executive director of National Novel Writing Month and the co-founder of the lit mag 100 Word Story, has focused on longer narrative forms for most of his writing career. He wondered, however, if instead of building an entire world with text—to sew connections, to explain—he did the opposite.

“What if instead of relying on the words of a story, I relied on the spectral spaces around those words? What if I privileged excision over any notion of comprehensiveness, and formed narratives around caesuras and crevices?”

Two stories in Fissures, “The Toad” and “Way Station”, were chosen for Best Small Fictions 2016, judged by Stuart Dybeck.

The Details

Publisher: Press 53 (May 1, 2015)
ISBN-10: 1941209203
ISBN-13: 978-1941209202
Address: Press 53, PO Box 30314, Winston-Salem, NC 27130-0314

Raves

“There is danger in these pages, to be sure, but it is peril experienced through a series of sharp revelations, each positively embracing human nature on the fearless edge. I keep returning to these people and their lives, trying to learn more, reaching into the crevices, taking their risks and my chances—and enjoying the ride. Again and again. A hundred times.”
—James Thomas, editor of Flash Fiction International: Very Short Stories from Around the World

“Fissures is disjunction at its most disruptive—Faulkner’s stories are ‘spectral spaces’ captured with ‘hard borders’ and his dangerous eye for truth.”
—Pamela Painter, author of Wouldn’t You Like to Know

“Grant Faulkner’s stories are poetic and creepy and funny and touching and you’re going to have a swell time. I wish I had written some of them.”
—Lou Beach, author of 420 Characters

“Grant Faulkner is the impresario of 100-word stories. The 100 tantalizing fictions in shock and please—a precious pile of sparkling surprises.”
—Jane Ciabattari, author of Stealing the Fire and California Stories

“Grant Faulkner’s sharply observed, darkly funny, heart-breaking bursts of highly compressed prose offers a startling view of what reality might look like through a funhouse microscope. Fissures pushes the boundaries of flash prose, and thank goodness for that. Sometimes less is so much more.”
—Dinty W. Moore, author of Dear Mister Essay Writer Guy: Advice and Confessions on Writing, Love, and Cannibals

Reading from Fissures

At Why Are There Words, March 12, 2015

Excerpt from Fissures

Several of the stories in Fissures are available online. Please see the Stories page of this website to read more.

The Toad

Flattened by a car, its arms spread out, a little like Jesus. The sun had baked it as crisp as a potato chip.

“Poor toad,” Maria said. “Didn’t know how to cross the road.”

“Maybe he thought the car was a new friend,” I said. “Rushing to greet him.”

“Or he was puzzling how such a small thing in the distance could become so large.”

We spent hours in such conversations. It was nice, how we never talked about what was next, who we were together. As if the toad wasn’t part of every story in its way, even ours.