shortshortshort.com

shortshortshort.com, January 2009

Stories with footnotes rock1. The fact that Bruce Holland Rogers has managed to squeeze eight footnotes into “Memoir,” a 300-word story, just makes that feat more impressive2. As is often the case, the footnotes offer their own story3. As many authors before Rogers have found, footnotes can offer additional humor to a story5. In this [...]

shortshortshort.com, December 2008

In his December, 2008, shortshortshort.com offerings, Bruce Holland Rogers looks at a man who follows all the “Rules of the Road” in the story with that title. Ken simply has the need to obey the rules, even more than his brother, Scott, who is a police officer. When life’s circumstances get away from [...]

shortshortshort.com, November 2008

When my editor asked me to review the November, 2008, offerings from Bruce Holland Rogers’s shortshortshort.com, I was tempted to ask if said editor knew of my reputation around flash fictional lands. After all, an essay I wrote a while back stirred up some angry feelings among flash fiction writers. This feeling was added to, [...]

shortshortshort.com, Sept/Oct 2008

Bruce Holland Rogers’s “Fish Out of Water,” the first shortshortshort story of September, is not the sort of story the title would normally indicate. Rather than looking at the life of someone who is not in their correct line, it looks at a fisherman who ignores the one rule of the river in which [...]

shortshortshort.com, August 2008

Apparently, “China Moss” is not only the title of a short short by Bruce Holland Rogers, but also a type of dessert, for which Rogers desires the recipe (please send it to him if you have it). In the story of that title, however, the dessert serves almost like a madeleine for Larry upon [...]

shortshortshort.com, July 2008

There are many who travel to experience new cultures, but there are also people who travel to confirm their point of view that their own society is the best. In his first short short for July, “Travelogue,” Bruce Holland Rogers focuses on a couple that travels by train to a variety of foreign nations. [...]

shortshortshort.com, June 2008

Many of Bruce Holland Rogers’s short shorts focus their attention on the anonymity of life in the big city. His first two stories for June fall firmly in this vein, although in very different ways.
“Monologue Number Six” focuses on the anonymous phone call everyone is forced to listen to on public transportation when a [...]

shortshortshort.com, May 2008

Bruce Holland Rogers’s short shorts for May start with “The Peach at the End of Days,” an almost nihilistic look at the world. The two speakers are discussing prophecy and the future, and one of them clearly is looking for a peek into the near future of his world. The other, just as [...]

shortshortshort.com, April 2008

Bruce Holland Rogers’s short shorts for April consist of three stories, the longest of which clocks in at just over 700 words.
In “Dear Lisa,” an advice columnist realizes that despite all the advice she has struggled to give over the years, in general, her readers aren’t really looking for advice but merely for entertainment. She [...]

shortshortshort.com, March 2008

Men suffering from a midlife crisis is a thematic cliché, but in “The Midlife Forecast for Men,” one of the three March, 2008, shortshortshort.com offerings, Bruce Holland Rogers takes the cliché and adds humor to it by reporting on a midlife crisis in the guise of a television weather report. Rather than look at [...]

shortshortshort.com, Jan/Feb 2008

In “One,” the first shortshortshort.com story of January, 2008, Bruce Holland Rogers presents a video game with a purpose greater than simple entertainment. While this idea has been used before, for instance in the 1984 film, The Last Starfighter, in “One,” Rogers is trying to set the stage for something more complex than simply [...]

shortshortshort.com, Nov/Dec 2007

Pushcart and Nebula Award-winning author Bruce Holland Rogers gives subscribers a good deal: for ten dollars a year, they receive (by email) three stories a month. As Rogers says, “Thirty-six stories for ten dollars. That’s about twenty-eight cents a story.” They’re short stories, rarely longer than 2000 words, but in today’s nanosecond attention span [...]

Shortshortshort.com, Sept/Oct 2007

Bruce Holland Rogers, the creative force behind shortshortshort.com, served up a mixed sextet of ultrashort stories for September and October, 2007. Here you’ll find some of Rogers’s best work, as well as some less-than-stellar tales.
“Stoppage” is not one of Rogers’s clearer stories. A cat sitting on sheet music provides the inspiration for a metaphysical digression [...]