I Call This Flirting

by Sherrie Flick

"I Call This Flirting is a collection of fever-dreams, haunted by desire, grief, sex, and memory. These are late-night stories, told after midnight, a femme fatale whispering sad and unraveled and lusty tales into your ear. That femme fatale is Sherrie Flick, and she’s a wickedly good writer."

– John McNally, author of The Book of Ralph

To order:
Casey Huff, editor
Flume Press at CSU, Chico
400 W. First St.
Chico, CA 95929-0830

flumepress@csuchico.edu

46 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Sherrie Flick’s debut novel RECONSIDERING HAPPINESS is out with University of Nebraska Press (2009). I CALL THIS FLIRTING, her awarding-winning chapbook of flash fiction, was published in 2004 (Flume Press). Her work appears in the anthologies FLASH FICTION FORWARD (Norton) and NEW SUDDEN FICTION (Norton) as well as THE ROSE METAL PRESS FIELD GUIDE TO WRITING FLASH FICTION. A recipient of a PA Council on the Arts grant and residencies from the Ucross Foundation and Atlantic Center for the Arts, she lives in Pittsburgh where she teaches and works as a freelance writer and editor. For 10 years, she served as Artistic Director for the Gist Street Reading Series. www.giststreet.org

Reviews

[William · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection ends with three words: pure, sweet, uncluttered. These adjectives describe the possibility of happiness, but they also describe the author's writing style.

The women in I Call This Flirting are vivid and intense. The men are enigmatic though very closely observed. Cats figure in many of the scenes. As do pies--burned pies and beautiful pies. Also screen doors and the sky and the ground and sex.

Such good writing.

[Tara · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite flash fiction books. She is especially talented with condensing and layering time, and she gets lots of credit for experimenting and taking chances.

[Robert Yune · Rating 5 out of 5]

I probably would have enjoyed this chapbook anyway, but I appreciated it so much more after moving to the Midwest. This book is sharp and precise, but not clinical. Its stories are peppered with whiskey and heartbreak and travel--a messily organized and comfortable trip through an America that most people know but few people write faithfully about.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although it goes by different names depending on whom you ask, the literary term that I prefer for very short stories is flash fiction. Flash fiction stories are generally between 50-500 words and cover all territories that full-length short stories tackle. In other words, they are perfect brief journeys for those who would rather read literature than cheap magazines while waiting for their oil to be changed or their bowels to move.

The sad truth though is that few writers can actually condense language enough to deliver readers an entire world in such a short space.

Sherrie Flick is an exception. Her debut collection, I Call This Flirting, gathers 34 stories that are an excellent argument for the potency, viability, and longevity of flash fiction.

More than that, they are just good reads.

Sherrie Flick has the unique, and necessary, ability to set up a story with a killer first line. From her story Locusts: I want him to go away, leave like the locusts did after they heaved their ugly bodies down and destroyed everything. Or this one from This is the Beginning of Time: The city streets are slick and flat, and the idea of living in the middle of a big, empty patch of nothing is everywhere around me.

A great set-up requires an equally compelling follow-up, and Flick delivers there too. This collection is packed full of characters you would love to settle down on a barstool next to on a forgotten November afternoon. They are, in the best sense, pure Americana: seducing the paperboy, digging in the garden, sipping 15 cent coffee out of "styrofoam cups the color of Elmer's Glue," or, more often, sipping whiskey as those gray forgotten afternoons turn into endless black nights.

[Mary Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

These short (very short!) stories are fascinating! The author has an impressive ability to acquaint the reader with vibrant, deep, complex, and often somewhat dark, troubled characters in a matter of paragraphs. I was intrigued by the voice of each story, wanting to know more about them (rather,"her", as it seemed the voice was always a woman), when the stories come to a quick end. And yet I didn't feel that they ended too abruptly - I felt satisfied with a complete story, left at the right moment to think about it on my own. I think that is the beauty of the stories - how complete and deep they are in their brevity.

Sherrie Flick also has a knack for capturing the regional/local feel of some of the stories' settings. Most of the stories seemed to be in the Midwest, and there are also fun and interesting observations/fantasies about people in Las Vegas, Pittsburgh, and Oklahoma, to name a few.

I also really enjoyed the insight into relationships (which came across very subtly throughout the stories) - the many stages a relationship goes through, cycles back, ends, starts over, etc.

I highly recommend this book - it's introspective and fun at the same time. And a very quick read which is always a plus!

[B.K. Loren · Rating 4 out of 5]

The form asked for my best guess of the "date I read this book." That's a difficult question. I first read it in 2002, I think--whatever the date was when it first hit the shelves. I have read it dozens of times since then and I am still reading it. This book has brains and heart. It also has something so many books today lack: a graceful, un-self-conscious, integrated sense of language. One sentence can make you swoon, can make you laugh, can make you cry, can turn grit into beauty and beauty into grit--and that's a good thing. That's a great thing. There's simply no excuse not to read this book right now. They are short-shorts: you have time.

[Randall · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought up a bunch of copies of this collection to use in my writing class at Saint Joseph's University. First, the writing is so great: "Love is an ocean, pounding and pounding on the rocks, like Christmas tree lights blinking in a window, beckoning." The movement from ocean, to the rhythmic pounding, to the blinking of lights awes me. And I love the way the sentence ends with "beckoning." So many sentences are like this. Such brilliance! There's an urgency and longing in the writing and stories that beckon to the reader. I discovered how to write flash (on the advice of Pamela Painter) by reading this collection. I Call This Genuis, I tell you. Genius.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

I Call This Flirting has this stripped-down Alice Munro thing going on that is fantastic. Not the situations per se, Alice Munro never had a lonely character sleep with the paperboy, and I don't think her characters drink this much, but the sense of longing and found love, how we get it and lose it invoked Munro for me.

[Kathy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just received my copy of this, I'm very eager to read Sherrie Flick's chapbook.

Okay, read it and whooosh, loved it very much. My favorite of the whole collection was "Nebraska Men" which begins with this odd, perfect sentence: "In Nebraska men keep small colorful seashells in their mouths."

[Rusty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whoever called these wickedly good was right on target. It's hard to resist the title, and equally hard to resist the stories: condensed, beautiful, insightful, altogether good. I admire this writing and this book a great deal.

[Timothy · Rating 5 out of 5]

What flash should be.

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous writing. I didn't want it to be over.

[Kenny Chaffin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have not read this book as a whole, it is on my TBR list, but give it a 4 star rating based on the stories I've read elsewhere.

The title story is wonderful.
as is Oklahoma Men.