Flash Fiction Critique and Advice

Does anybody know of any good examples of flash fiction?

>>8504581
>>8506196
Flash Fiction is a surrender to mediocrity, compromising with this generations infantilized lack of attention span and dedication.
Its not that short fiction can't be good it just isn't because of who it attracts both as writers and readers

>how do you craft a story in such little space?
Read Donald Barthelme. He'll teach you that you don't really have to.

>>8506196
Also try Flannery O'Connor's "Why Do The Heathen Rage?". That one story and basically everything of Barthelme's, I think about a lot.

>>8506251
Relax. Flash fiction predates this generation by decades and is still not very popular with people young or old. Millenials are consistently outreading their parents anyway, read a study.

>>8506354
Yeah I've seen the studies Huffingpost. Outread them in genreshit and YA fiction, may as well add facebook posts while you're at it

>>8506381
If you seriously think that older generations aren't reading equivalently pulpy stuff, you're a certifiable moron. Anyways who cares about what millenials in general are reading, and who cares about whether or not fiction is short of long? What's so bad about appealing to a short attention span? As if good art has to be totally independant from what its viewers want it to be. Ridiculous.

>>8506392
Because you're responding to a declining trend by facilitating it rather than challenging it. You're forgetting too that a short attention span doesn't just mean readers spend less time on works they also exert far less mental strain demanding simpler and digestable content. Which is why flash fiction so often relies on shock and twists rather than any nuanced expressions and meaningful explorations that can't be seen when you have a Buzzfeed video playing on your other tab

I know myself this well from the Literary Society in my University embracing the genre to the detriment of any potential its members may have held.

>>8506408
>facilitating a declining trend
Fair enough, but does it matter that in a literary moment where something as long as "Infinite Jest" is the most significant landmark?

>readers exert less mental strain
I find the opposite to be true. Longer works mean readers rush, skim, or avoid reading everything but certain passages too closely. Flash fiction encourages more thought, not less.

>Shock and twists
I think you're reading the wrong kind of flash fiction. There is a lot of non-literary flash fiction out there, but those stories shouldn't be compared to longer literary fiction. If anything we have to compare those things to the equivalently low-brow stuff within full-length fiction. There is definately a larger proportion of low-brow flash fiction than full-lenght fiction, but I don't think that's of any significance as far as the value of flash fiction as literature is concerned.

>>8506458
Which was precisely my point to begin with. I have no disrespect for shorter fiction whatsoever as a concept only the actual existing trend of Flash Fiction in context of todays reading culture.

And on the contrary I think the mythic status of Infinite Jest is exactly a sympthom of this culture. A book of such titanic scale takes takes on a Godly status in a culture increasingly bereft of anything in between.