Clients quite often ask me for recommendations of novellas-in-flash featuring speculative, fantastical, magical realist, or science-fiction elements.
The honest answer is that — as far as I’m aware — there have been only a few so far.
This means there’s a huge opportunity for all you writers out there!
An opportunity to be pioneering the growth of a developing genre within the novella-in-flash — because, as you’ll know from the market for more traditional genre novels, speculative / fantastical / magical realist / science-fiction styles of writing are enormously popular and have very devoted audiences who are always hungry for new books!
So here’s a list below. While the list may be short, there are some superb books here.
If you personally know of others that could/should be in this list, please comment or let me know, and I’ll add them to the record here…
Novellas-in-Flash (or similarly styled books) that involve speculative / fantasy / magical realist / science-fiction elements:
Ballard, J.G., The Atrocity Exhibition (1970; London: Fourth Estate, 2014)
Brautigan, Richard, In Watermelon Sugar (1968; London: Vintage, 2015)
Chapman, Margaret Patton, ‘Bell and Bargain’, in My Very End of the Universe: Five Novellas-in-Flash and a Study of the Form (Brookline: Rose Metal Press, 2014)
Cousins, Heather, Something in the Potato Room (Tucson: Kore Press, 2009)
Disch, Thomas M., ‘334’, in the novella collection 334 (1974; New York: Vintage Books, 1999)
Elvy, Michelle, The everrumble (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2019)
Garland, Alex, The Coma (London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 2004)
Gebbie, Vanessa, Ed’s Wife and Other Creatures (Gwynedd: Liquorice Fish Books, 2015)
Greenberg, Roppotucha, Getting by in Tligolian (Arachne Press, 2023)
Hunter, Megan, The End We Start From (London: Picador, 2017)
Lane, Martha, Lies Over the Ocean (Alien Buddha Press, 2023)
Loesch, Kristen, The Regeneration of Stella Yin (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2022)
Moorcock, Michael, A Cure for Cancer (1971; London: Penguin Random House, 2016)
Porter, Max, Grief is the Thing with Feathers (London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 2015)
Shun-lien Bynum, Sarah, Madeleine is Sleeping (Orlando: Harcourt Books, 2004)
van Llewyn, Sophie, Bottled Goods (Oxford: Fairlight Books, 2018)
Vonnegut, Kurt, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969; London: Vintage Classics, 1991)
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