Composed of short form pieces from the sixteenth century to the present, this anthology edited by Alan Ziegler gives readers a sense of the long tradition of the form and how authors across generations continue to influence one another. Arranged chronologically by the year of each author’s birth, there are prose poems, short-short stories, brief essays, fragments, and more from writers such as Louise-Sébastien Mercier, William Blake, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, Octavio Paz, Lydia Davis, Kimiko Hahn, and Claudia Rankine. Ziegler, who instituted a Short Prose Forms class at Columbia University in 1989, encourages writers to think past genre: “Perhaps space constriction lends itself to work that subverts expectations, or maybe when writers work in a renegade form they feel free to throw caution to the winds of imagination.”
