'Tiny Nightmares,' Co-edited by Professor Lincoln Michel, Released October 13, 2020

Tiny Nightmares, a collection of horror-themed flash fiction stories co-edited by Adjunct Assistant Professor and Alumnus Lincoln Michel '07, was released by Catapult on October 13, 2020. The collection also features work by several Writing alumni, including Selena Gambrell Anderson '10, Theresa Hottel '18, and Adjunct Assistant Professor Hilary Leicther '12. 

In the style of their previous collection, Tiny Crimes (Black Balloon Press, 2018), Michel and co-editor Nadxieli Nieto have brought together 42 blood-curdling flash fiction pieces by authors such as Samantha Hunt, Brian Evenson, Jac Jemc, and Stephen Graham Jones. In fewer than 1,500 words each, the stories explore both the monsters and gory serial killers of classic horror tales as well as real-life terrors like social media addiction, racism, and homelessness. 

The result is what Publisher's Weekly calls a "masterful anthology...that capture[s] terrors both supernatural and mundane" and a "genuinely scary collection" in which "each of these vivid, visceral tales engages with horrors with striking immediacy." 

Kirkus Reviews writes: "these are achingly brief but exquisitely crafted fragments of horror, some real, some imagined, and some incomplete..there are plenty of iconic frights here, among them vampires and werewolves, but it's surprising how very different all of these stories are, especially given their limits...Sick and twisted and troubling: reading it is like stumbling on an old horror movie on TV in the middle of the night."

According to Michel, "Tiny Nightmares is a part of a series of anthologies that Nadxieli Nieto and I have done, each using flash fiction to explore, subvert, and expand our ideas of different genres. The previous collections were Gigantic Worlds (science fiction) and Tiny Crimes (crime fiction). One of our motivations for the series was to kick out a few more bricks in the barrier between so-called "literary fiction" and so-called "genre fiction." So our anthologies always feature writers from the genre world alongside writers from the literary world side by side. 

We chose horror fiction this time because, well, the world is a pretty horrifying place these days and fiction is still a way for us to process and explore the world we're living in. Tiny Nightmares features lots of stories of ghosts, vampires, and witches, but also stories of climate change, police brutality, and social media radicalization." 

Lincoln Michel is the author of Upright Beasts, a collection of genre-bending stories published by Coffee House Press. His work appears in The Paris Review, The New York Times, Strange Horizons, Granta, The Guardian, the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and elsewhere. He also teaches fiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College.