Fissures One Hundred 100Word Stories Author:Grant Faulkner In Fissures, a collection of one hundred 100-word stories, Grant Faulkner uses the hard borders 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 ... more »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?"
"Fissures is disjunction at its most disruptive," says Pamela Painter, author of Wouldn't You Like to Know. "Faulkner's stories are 'spectral spaces' captured with 'hard borders' and his dangerous eye for truth."
Two stories in Fissures, "The Toad" and "Way Station", were chosen for Best Small Fictions 2016, judged by Stuart Dybeck.« less