“For more than a decade, Kathy Fish has been skewering the American landscape to bring us startling, unforgettable stories of people trying to forge a path through this shattered world. Her characters — patchwork families, scrappy siblings, unraveling couples, strangers, neighbors, and women confronting the violent self-annihilation that attends motherhood — are wracked by their actions and inactions. Surreality may be the only way out. If she did not coin the term flash fiction, we have her to thank for singlehandedly growing and elevating the dynamic form, securing its indelible place in the literary canon. With Wild Life, Fish demonstrates time and again why she is one of the most exciting and influential writers we have. Her range is on full display in this brilliant, comprehensive collection, an absolute must for students and teachers, for writers and readers across the genres." Sara Lippmann, author of Doll Palace
Fish's flash fiction was also selected by Stuart Dybek for inclusion in Best Small Fictions 2016 and Amy Hempel for Best Small Fictions 2017. Two other stories were selected for the W.W. Norton anthology, New Micro. Additionally, several of her stories have been selected for the Wigleaf Top 50. She has also had stories chosen for the first short story vending machines in the U.S. at Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope Cafe in San Francisco.
Kathy Fish's stories have been published or are forthcoming in The Lineup: 20 Provocative Women Writers (Black Lawrence Press, 2015, Richard Thomas (ed.), Choose Wisely: 35 Women Up to No Good (Upperrubberboot Press, 2015) Slice, Guernica, Indiana Review, Mississippi Review online, Denver Quarterly, New South, Quick Fiction, and various other journals and anthologies. She was the guest editor of Dzanc Books' "Best of the Web 2010." She is the author of four other collections of short fiction: a chapbook of flash fiction in the chapbook collective, "A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness: Four Chapbooks of Short Short Fiction by Four Women" (Rose Metal Press, 2008), "Wild Life" (Matter Press, 2011) and "Together We Can Bury It" (The Lit Pub 2012) and "Rift," co-authored with Robert Vaughan (Unknown Press, 2016). She has been a fiction editor for Smokelong Quarterly and judged a number of flash fiction contests. She has taught flash fiction to high school students at American University's Discover the World of Communication summer program.
UGH, i don't know a writer who does flash fiction better than kathy fish. her work is always so compressed, yet unfailingly packs such a gut punch. in so few words, she's able to simultaneously capture her characters' humanity and the details of their quiet longings and off-center pain (+ the not infrequent comedy that accompanies these things). what a weird little collection. subtle and super whimsical.........will definitely be revisiting this over and over!!!
Compression flies out the window when I attempt to put into words the countless ways Kathy Fish has forever changed my life and my writing, but once you experience her genius, you'll understand why I'm reduced to a blithering fool, and what a supreme honor it was to blurb this stellar collection by one of our greatest living writers:
For more than a decade, Kathy Fish has been skewering the American landscape to bring us startling, unforgettable stories of people trying to forge a path through this shattered world. Her characters --- patchwork families, scrappy siblings, unraveling couples, strangers, neighbors, and women confronting the violent self-annilihation that attends motherhood -- are wracked by their actions and inactions. Surreality may be the only way out. If she did not coin the term flash fiction, we have her to thank for singlehandedly growing and elevating the dynamic form, securing its indelible place in the literary canon. With Wild Life, Fish demonstrates time and again why she is one of the most exciting and influential writers we have. Her range is on full display in this brilliant, comprehensive collection, an absolute must for students and teachers, for writers and readers across the genres. No two stories are alike; each one dazzles in its own surprising way, all of them remarkable gems. Some, like "At Ethel and Harry's On the Last Night," contain the astounding scope of a novel in a few compressed pages; others, like "Lioness" open up with a scream. Fish fearlessly explodes structure and upends form with a playfulness and permissiveness that transcends myopic conventions of storytelling. Devour them, but don't be deceived by their thumbnail size; her stories are expansive, rife with a complexity that demands a slow, dedicated, and repeated read. Even after a close study, you won't begin to grasp how she devastates and delights on a single line. This is her inimitable magic. She will gut you with the sheer precision of her emotional restraint. Images don't just pop but vibrate through the senses. The familiar becomes unfamiliar in exquisite juxtaposition. Through Fish's deft pen, the wind is never the wind but "the hands of many children clapping." Rooms smell like creamed corn. Parachutes bloom like jellyfish. A party hat becomes a narwhal's tooth. The road and clouds press down upon a trapped narrator like two large hands. Every story shatters, unsettling the fractured ground on which we stand, and then somehow invites the reader to gather shards and hold them to the light. That is grace. "This broken planet needs a hero," one of her characters says. My hero, bar none, is Kathy Fish.
I’m a huge fan of Kathy Fish — both her flash workshops and her writing. Her stories have a unique ‘feel’ to them. Great writers have the ability to conjure emotion by indirect means, through setting and events, and she does this again and again with such ease. She’s also a master at covering a lifetime within a few short paragraphs — such a difficult thing to do well — and all in such a matchless lyrical voice. An inspiration!
A title can have as much power as the piece itself in flash. Kathy Fish is a master if not THE master of flash, and I was happy to order this collection as soon as it was released so I'd have some of her best work in one place to marvel, and even aspire to. I used to think Flash was about containing a complete story in one small space. Now I see that with flash there are no rules, and what's left out can still be felt and seen through what remains on the page. Wonderful collection.
What can be said about Kathy Fish’s writing that hasn’t been said before? She is a deserved legend of the flash fiction world, and Wild Life is a glorious collection containing work that spans fifteen years.
Fish’s themes are panoramic, distilled to their essence in these perfectly formed miniatures. She understands the human predicament, she writes sparingly, lyrically, with precision, about loss and longing, love and dreams. The world she creates is slightly off-centre, yet totally familiar, so carefully built, word by word. She crams the tiniest of spaces with illuminating wisdom, humour, and pathos, and with characters who are so close that you can feel their breath on the back of your neck as you read.
These stories - all 109 of them - need re-visiting again and again, they demand to be savoured, and this collection will stay by my bedside until it falls apart.
If you love short stories and are interested in flash fiction, this should be on your shelves. If you are a frequent student of Kathy Fish (full disclosure here: of course I am!), you'll want to keep this as a souvenir. If you need desperately to capture the meaning of this often painful and confusing thing called life, I don't see how you can do without this collection.
I love Kathy Fish's flash fiction and value her so much as a teacher and as a person. Most of the fiction I've had published recently has been a direct result of her teaching. I am so THRILLED that I finally read this collection. I'd read many of the stories before, but many were new to me. I'm sure I'll keep coming back to it because she's a master. I learn so much from her work.
My favorite piece from this collection is available for free online. Please, go read it now:
It's a compilation of my own favorite stories from the past 15 years and I was pretty picky about what I included. I'm proud of this book. Thanks for reading.
Kathy Fish is a master storyteller and this collection is a great introduction to her work and the flash form. There’s a reason her Fast Flash workshops sell out immediately—those reasons are on full display in this collection.
I must have accidentally deleted my previous review so here goes again! Kathy Fish’s stories are a collective wonder. She pulls emotion out of the ordinary, weird and most incongruous things and goes straight to the heart.
This little book is packed with as much life as some books many times longer, is a paperback with the emotional weight of a hardcover set. Each story is an easy read, and each one places you in a world that elbows out the one before and makes you linger there before entering the next one. Take that easy step into these stories, find your home and your self in each one.
Kathy Fish was the first flash fiction writer I ever read, and her work was what inspired me to start writing flash fiction myself. With 'Wild Life' I started marking the stories I loved and underlining lines that really shone, and I realised by the end that I'd underlined most of them. Kathy's stories feature tiny pockets of life, many containing bubbles of poignancy, but unlike bubbles, these moments do not disappear - they linger long, later cropping up in dreams or even changing your perspective slightly. There are too many standout pieces to mention but 'Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild' is one of my favourites and so sadly relevant. I also loved 'Swicks Rule!' which deals with an overfamiliar theme, namely grief, but in such an unfamiliar way. For anyone new to flash fiction, 'Wild Life' is a wonderful introduction to the genre.
Kathy Fish is a master of flash fiction. I've read many of the stories in this volume before but I was thrilled to see them here again. Whether the story is a short paragraph or a few pages long, each packs an emotional punch. Grief, joy, fear, love, anger, hope, surprise - every emotion can be found in these pages, the predominant one being a sense of grace. Highly recommend!
Fish is a master. Such vividly human characters, such intense peeks into their lives. A single word can change everything and I was constantly on the edge of my seat to catch it when it did.
Kathy is the master at creating sprawling worlds within a paragraph or a few pages at most. There are so many great images throughout these stories, activating all our senses: "the bones of his back like a succession of doorknobs," "helicopter seeds spun down from the maples," "a drop of rain holding on to the tip of his nose," "a smoky brasserie in Paris," a room that "smells like rotten apples" and a woman like "Dove soap." The lines she kicks off so many of these stories with too! "My sisters and I rode to Devil's Backbone in our uncle's black Ford Falcon;" "It's 11:00 in the morning on New Year's Eve and we've just buried my dad;" "My neighbor Mr. Dorn is standing naked on my front steps, singing;" "I am eight years old and this is the year I learn to float." This is an essential work by a flash fiction queen.
In this collection by Kathy Fish entitled Wild Life, we find a reservoir of flash fiction pieces following the theme of the animal nature of humans whittled down to base emotion, human existence and “slice of life” pieces, and the interpersonal relations of humans. Each piece that makes up this collection holds a level of resonance that stays with you for the rest of time. One could spend a millennium pulling meaning from these flash fiction pieces. The first chapter of the collection is titled “Animal Kingdom”. It follows the fears and wants of young people – the feeling of being small, and at times constrained. We see the fear of a mother is Fish’s story entitled “Warrior”, “Lately, she’s had visions of fire ants crawling through his scalp, entering his nostrils, his eye sockets. She regards him with a terrible precision,” pg. 26. Fish regards aging as something which occurs too fast, where we’ve got barely enough time to figure what we’ve got in this world. In her flash fiction piece titled “Petunias” she says, “They stand in their backyards by the petunias, at a loss,” pg. 31. The following chapter “Humans In The Wild” follows the observation of humans in a wild world. We see a slice of life of a fighting couple, a woman with cancer and wonder-filled children. This chapter follows both the wonderful and terrible parts of what it means to be a person. The last chapter is entitled “The Knowing (Hu)Man”. This chapter, similar to the last, follows humans in a wild word. However, this chapter tackles more concepts of interpersonal relationships and what it means to have that closeness. This chapter features pieces such as “A Room With Many Small Beds”, the story of a young child, and their father’s girlfriend, Pearl, and “Space Man”, a story of a man who goes to space and his girlfriend Jane. This book is one which you will not be able to put down. It is riveting, page turning, and shows all of the wonderfully tragic pieces which go into being a person.
Riddled with riveting experiences, 'Wild Life' takes us through different lives and images in such an astounding way that will have us thinking about it even years after reading it.
'Wild Life' contains several flash fiction pieces by Kathy Fish, who is not only well-known for her flash stories, but also for her workshops and teachings in flash fiction as well. Her knowledge and imagination comes to life in this collection of surreal and breathtaking stories woven together, telling not only of different scenes and characters, but also of Kathy Fish’s experiences and perspective throughout the decade in which these stories have existed across multiple literature magazines. Fish has created enthralling and graphic stories in each flash piece that will have us running to the next page before we even realize it! I couldn’t take my eyes away from each line to the next, and the next, until I couldn’t stop following the story and I was suddenly at the end of the piece, filled with a sense of familiarity at the images before me but not knowing exactly how they all fit whilst understanding how they all came together.
With all that being said, if you want something quick to read in one sitting, or would like to have something to think back on for the next few weeks—even years!—to come, Kathy Fish’s 'Wild Life' is definitely worth picking up and keeping around, especially for countless re-reads.
Kathy Fish’s collection of thought provoking flash fiction pieces, Wild Life, explores human emotionality in a vibrant and multi-dimensional way. Reading this book provides you with the experience of a wide range of emotions including (but not limited to): humor, grit, bizarreness, tenderness and longing. Each fiction piece represents several characters from varying different stages of life and settings allowing the reader to develop a new perspective of wonder and curiosity at everyday living. Immersive scenes encaptures the characters' world perfectly making it easy to emphasize through each fleeting narrative. The stories are quick, easily digestible, yet complex in its aspects of illustrating sonder. Each story distinguishes itself from the others, but the commonality of human emotion is consistent throughout the collection. The added bonus of casting many stories through a surreal lens somehow makes it more impactful. It is as if she finds a way to use absurdity in fiction to create a sort of counter-intuitive fact that can only be understood through the irrationality of our emotions. This element of emotion resonates deeply making you want to come back for more. I absolutely recommend this book as it makes me feel so much. It is a tool that captures the essence of the human experience.
“There is no Albequerque. And I am beautiful.” A child imagines the various forms of cancer she and her mother will be diagnosed with. A wedding party plays Would You Rather in a rainstorm. And a girl grows horns along her forehead. Kathy Fish proves time and time again that she is a true master of flash fiction, wowing readers with stories that range from the wonderfully absurd to the heartachingly mundane. She reminds readers what it means to be human, what it means to dream, and how wild this life truly is. She fills each short piece with raw emotion and masterful writing, making each piece stand out as a gem among the rest. While some stories are hopeful, like “There is No Albequerque,” others focus on fear and anxiety, such as “Cancer Arm.” This collection is a whirlwind of emotion, bringing readers along on a journey through their emotions. Simultaneously timeless and timely, these stories can apply to readers from a variety of backgrounds and ages. While “Would You Rather?” can take place in nearly any time period, “Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild” is a stark and poignant reminder of the ever-present danger of guns and automatic weapons. “A group of schoolchildren is a target.”
Kathy Fish’s Wild Life is a must-read for anyone wanting to dip their toes into the genre of Flash Fiction. Wild Life is a collection of Fish’s works over the span of fifteen years and in turn offers a wide range of insight into this talented author’s life work. Fish is an expert at creating worlds and meaningful stories in mere sentences. She also does an exceptional job of bringing the reader deeper into the collection by creating a sense of mystery and captivation. Some pieces are humorous, some are confusing and scary, some are heartwarming, and others bittersweet or sorrowful, the best part of Fish’s work is that you never know what you are going to get when you turn the page, but you look forward to grasping the paper between your fingers and moving on and into the next journey. My personal favorite pieces include “The Once Mighty Ferguson’s” on page 4, “One Purple Finch” on page 13, “Sea Creatures of Indiana” on page 16, “Lionness” on page 19, “Collection Day” on page 24, “The Hollow” on page 35, and “Cancer Arm” on page 45.
Ecstatic, painful, tender and brimming with life. Sometimes reminded me of the careful compression of Raymond Carver but these stories are super short. Fish is a master at these quick, furtive glimpses at American life.
This collection is like the weather in Canada. You can experience all four seasons simply travelling across the country. I feel like I just travelled across a country of emotions - so much so that I’m reading it again.
There's little new to say about Kathy Fish's writing that hasn't already been said. These little stories dazzle in their strangeness and resonance and range.