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WILL STONE fact-checks the colourful life of Ozzy Osbourne
A trawl for terse tales
Want to see your name in print? Now's your chance... ANDY HEDGECOCK explains how you can do it in this guide to writing 'flash fiction' and how you can submit your work to the Morning Star
JAMES CROSSLEY applauds a lucid biography of the German radical preacher who reemerged as a hero in the GDR
Prizes all round: the Bard hands plaudits to the Miners Gala, OT&JC, Joe Solo, Black Sabbath’s frontman and the Lionesses
Star cartoonist JAMIE BRITTON is in awe of a graphic novel of epic proportions that explores class, religion and globalisation via the strange cultivation of Ginseng in the US Midwest
GUILLERMO THOMAS is intrigued by a history of the Middle East that demonstrates how promising post colonial beginnings were snuffed out by Western imperialist interests
MARIA DUARTE recommends the intricate study of a high-performance and highly dysfuntional German family
WHAT is flash fiction? Poet and fiction writer Nuala Ni Chonchuir describes it as “intense, urgent and often a little explosive, but also deep and clear.” All in fewer than 1,000 words.
One well-known flash is a six-word tragedy, sometimes attributed to Ernest Hemingway: “For sale, baby shoes, never worn.”
The most common formats are the drabble or micro fiction (100 words), the dribble or mini-saga (50 words), sudden fiction (750 words) and twitterature (280 characters). But a quick browse of online flash competitions reveals a more varied range of word lengths.
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