The Best Small Fictions 2022
From the Publisher: Best Small Fictions is the first-ever contemporary anthology solely dedicated to anthologizing the best internationally published short hybrid fiction in a given calendar year. Best Small Fictions features the best microfiction, flash fiction, haibun stories, and prose poetry from around the world.
Graciela was nominated by SAND Journal and selected for the 2022 anthology from among thousands of entries.
FLOCK: Issue 22
From the Publisher: Flock literary journal opens space for boundary-pushing literature by publishing emotionally resonant work that is strange yet familiar, surprising but grounded, and softly experimental in form, language, or content.
Editors at FLOCK were “captivated” by Pan, a story that spans a young quartet of fleeing Sudanese refugees and one of them as an adult relocated to Nebraska, a deposed public official struggling to understand the new government during the period of the Four Pests Campaign in China, to a look inside the brilliant mind of Jimmy Only, one of the scientists who headed the Manhattan Project.
Writing
Low-Risk Activities
Winner of the 2024 FC2 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest
From the Publisher: Formally daring and emotionally disarming, Low-Risk Activities spins out twenty-two uncanny stories that feel like dispatches from a future already here—and already unraveling.
J Efron’s Low-Risk Activities is a genre-defying collection that slips between interview transcript, personal confession, government form, and speculative fable—told through the voices of orphans, immortals, office workers, digital nomads, and posthuman survivors. These are characters in limbo, each trying to make sense of a fractured world where logic doesn’t always follow law.
The book opens with Lan Caihe, a faux-memoir in which a gender-fluid, possibly immortal narrator navigates trauma, desire, and the politics of being unclassifiable—part myth, part autofiction, and entirely singular. Later entries mimic psychological evaluations, immigration interrogations, and philosophical questionnaires, inviting the reader not just to observe, but to participate.
Structured like a psychic excavation, Low-Risk Activities questions how we define personhood, how language shapes identity, and how systems reduce people to data—only to lose the meaning of what that data once held. Efron’s voice is intimate yet disorienting, full of humor, dread, and lyrical estrangement. Fans of Anne Carson, Jenny Boully, and Rivka Galchen will find familiar resonance in this work that refuses to resolve neatly—and in doing so, reveals something startlingly true.
Black Warrior Review: Issue 45.2
From the Publisher: BWR publishes fiction, nonfiction, poetry, comics, art, and hybrid work in print twice a year, and online throughout the year. Contributors include Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winners alongside emerging writers. BWR‘s past contributors have included Charles Simic, Diane Ackerman, Charles Baxter, John Irving, Margaret Atwood, Rainer Maria Rilke, Billy Collins, Jenny Offill, Joy Williams, Elizabeth Powell, Anthony Doerr, Anne Carson, Jennifer Cheng, Aimee Bender, Blake Butler, Paul Lisicky, Roxane Gay, Kristen Radtke, Vi Khi Nao, Paul Tran, and Tyrese Coleman, among many others.
Баба is a “complicated/complex” story that the editors nominated for the Chautauqua Prize. The story centers around the life of Baba Yaga, spanning thousands of years. It is a story about being foreign in various parts of the world across millenia: 21st century Turkmenistan, ancient Alexandria, Spain’s Santiago de Campostela pilgrimage route, Japan’s Kuril Islands, Celtic Europe, Roman Empire, post French Revolution, and China’s Jin Dynasty. The tales reveals all the different ways humans torture one another, and despite that the continuation of love.
“I was fascinated by the riffs on language” Black Warrior Review’s fiction editor
Selected Writing Excerpts
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I have heard a story of a babushka whose own house was bedizened with hard candies, licorice, and sweetened breads to attract larger meals than birds. To go through such trouble for some company and a proper meal one must be quite lonely indeed, not necessarily mad though, just desperate enough to seem mad. If the only thing to eat was crow, I’d welcome anything that wasn’t crow it should seem: though in the case of this certain babushka, why she didn’t just eat the candies and bread might just mean she was mad.
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Up until two years ago, flies and mosquitoes died their familiar, uncredited deaths without being tallied at the end of the month. I’ve since personally shoveled kilograms of them onto the scales to be weighed, recorded, reported, and then publicly broadcasted amidst delphic complements about our progress. I myself don’t understand a kilogram of flies even after having seen what it looks like.
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Have you ever let someone use a cup or dish that you either knew was unclean or were unsure about? yes no
What do you believe is a harder substance, tooth or bone?
Do you believe that humans would cooperate more as a species if we had predators? yes no
