Bare Ana, Regal House Publishing, 2025, 128pp.
In a modern literary landscape of red notifications, pixilated text, and fast-scrolls, brevity is brilliance. Stories that have been razored to a honed edge—flash fiction, sudden fiction, short fiction—are like pebbles in a pond: they may be small, but they send out big ripples. They distill a moment, a scene, an expression, or a movement into a revelation about life and what it means to be human… oftentimes, under 1,000 words.
In Bare Ana and Other Stories, Robert Shapard, the celebrated editor of flash and short fiction anthologies like Sudden Fiction and Flash Fiction International, shows he is not only a curator of these kinds of stories. He is a master crafter himself. With its kaleidoscope of short stories that deliver gut punches in the white gaps between words, it’s no wonder Bare Ana won the 2022 W.S. Porter Prize.
Most short story collections consist of five to twelve stories, usually averaging about ten. With Bare Ana, Shapard delivers 23 stories in just 115 pages—a swift, powerful punch of life lessons and meditations on existence.
In one standout story, “Black Leos,” a gymnast’s flawless, grueling routine goes unnoticed—met by cavernous quiet and a coach distracted by his phone. The story illuminates the isolation and disconnection of our tech-driven world, where attention to the beauty of the real moment is lost to screens, leaving its creators in solitude. With just this one powerful story, Shepard manages to convey all this complexity… in just 300 words.
In “Second-Rate Wasp,” a narrator desperately strives to fill their alcoholic father’s final days with love and joy, despite the bitter sadness of knowing that the alcoholism will win (300 words). In “Turtle Creek,” a group of young druggies’ all-night bender is shattered by a violent accident, its aftermath painted with vivid imagery of flashing police lights and twisted metal (200 words).
Between these sharp flashes, Shapard’s longer stories breathe. In “Dummy,” an ominous scene becomes almost unbearable as the narrator checks on their father, who is battling depression, only to find him limp on the floor, a victim of a desperate, violent act both shocking and inevitable. Meanwhile, “At the Back Door” explores the dangerous world of car repossession, revealing the toll it takes on the repossessor and inspired by Shapard’s firsthand experience.
Shapard also showcases how stories can explore genres typically associated with higher word counts. The title story, “Bare Ana,” ventures into the speculative, sculpting a world where gene correction has done everything from erasing diabetes to assuring perfect teeth—and where “pre-nate tats” have become the norm, tattooing infants before birth. One man’s young wife, whose mother never allowed her to be tattooed, must navigate being “bare” in a world where everyone’s skin is etched and their identity tied to their tattoos. The soon-to-be parents struggle to decide if their child should do what everyone else does or be born natural and risk being ostracized.
Bare Ana celebrates a story form that feels inherently modern but is also rooted in the fables and parables shaped throughout history. Aesop’s tales and Zen kaons all distilled complex ideas into compact narratives. Anton Chekhov and Kate Chopin may have elevated the short story, and serials like “Sherlock Holmes” cut novels into digestible chunks, but it was the innovators like Jorge Luis Borges who pushed short stories even shorter, bridging the gap between long, florid prose and fast, efficient poetry.
Flash fiction once seemed niche, but now online magazines and internet platforms—from journals to social media posts—are championing it. Literary magazines increasingly feature flash alongside longer works, because short pieces are now a perfect dance partner for the digital age.
Readers crave stories that deliver emotional insight, empathetic characters, and powerful scenes, and they want to read them in a single sitting. This isn’t because of shortened attention spans; it’s a recognition that flash fiction has a unique ability to distill human experiences. Every word counts. Form is vital. Great writing does not need to sprawl to be profound. Writing with immediacy and impact is the voice that writers need to have today, because the largest aspects of life can also fit into the smallest of spaces.
Robert Shapard’s Bare Ana doesn’t only platform flash—it weaponizes it. These stories are tiny grenades: compact enough to pocket, but powerful enough to leave a mark.
In other words, it’s small. It’s sharp. It’s unforgettable.
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Laura Hawbaker is a Chicago writer and editor with a background in ELL and education. She is the editor and creator of MASKS Literary Magazine, and her book/film reviews have appeared in Newcity Magazine, Bright Wall/Dark Room, and PopMatters. She holds an MA in linguistics and an MFA in creative writing. She’s currently working on a novel. Follow her on TikTok and Instagram.
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