Oct 18, 2026 · 59 min · 10 segments
Wednesday, Oct. 7—Over in the blink of an eye, the best flash fiction lingers long after we finish reading it. The incandescent works collected in Library of America’s…
Lynne TillmanGuest
Venita BlackburnGuest
Ben LooryGuest
Max RudinHostThanks very much.
That was fantastic.
Let's talk, I mean, it's such a compressed story.
And let's talk about kind of, you know, Vinita, why don't we start with you and then Ben, and we'll bring Lynn in who's- Um, it's such a compressed story and it is one paragraph.
Um, and it's, um, and it's dealing with all of it.
There's so much kind of inference in it, right? There has to be so much inference about the likes and, you know, we, as the reader have to participate in the storytelling in some way.
And I'm curious if you can talk a little bit about that as a, you know, an aesthetic necessity and what the form requires in that way.
Well, it is supposed to be kind of a modern form, trying to take into account the tech of the world, our new form of, you know, paper and, you know, telephones and all this stuff, the way that we communicate.
So I'm always emphasizing this to my students, too, that you need to not so much embrace, but interrogate the new paper of our world, which is tech.
So a lot of their stories are always set in the 90s and it's set in the 80s and it And I get it because if they do that, they don't have to deal with phones.
But you run the risk of getting it wrong because you're not quite tapped in.
So how has it changed us? How are we presenting ourselves to each other? In ways that are new.
And so I wanted to sort of investigate that new constructed self versus the interior self that is very much modern and contemporary, but also ubiquitous across generations in time that we've always been doing this.
We always are accustomed to doing it through whatever means of fashion, etc.
had to create the story where the mother, I'm always writing about mothers and daughters in different ways.
But the mother was the one classification that did not exist, right, in the labels.
Thanks very much.
That was fantastic.
Let's talk, I mean, it's such a compressed story.
And let's talk about kind of, you know, Vinita, why don't we start with you and then Ben, and we'll bring Lynn in who's- Um, it's such a compressed story and it is one paragraph.
Um, and it's, um, and it's dealing with all of it.
There's so much kind of inference in it, right? There has to be so much inference about the likes and, you know, we, as the reader have to participate in the storytelling in some way.
And I'm curious if you can talk a little bit about that as a, you know, an aesthetic necessity and what the form requires in that way.
Well, it is supposed to be kind of a modern form, trying to take into account the tech of the world, our new form of, you know, paper and, you know, telephones and all this stuff, the way that we communicate.
So I'm always emphasizing this to my students, too, that you need to not so much embrace, but interrogate the new paper of our world, which is tech.
So a lot of their stories are always set in the 90s and it's set in the 80s and it And I get it because if they do that, they don't have to deal with phones.
But you run the risk of getting it wrong because you're not quite tapped in.
So how has it changed us? How are we presenting ourselves to each other? In ways that are new.
And so I wanted to sort of investigate that new constructed self versus the interior self that is very much modern and contemporary, but also ubiquitous across generations in time that we've always been doing this.
We always are accustomed to doing it through whatever means of fashion, etc.
had to create the story where the mother, I'm always writing about mothers and daughters in different ways.
But the mother was the one classification that did not exist, right, in the labels.
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