2024 A Fresh Festoon of Mini-Short Stories: Or, a Rose by Any Other Name Would

Mini-short stories are "bite-sized" tales comprising some 500-2,500 words. Due to their uniqueness and brevity, mini-short stories undoubtedly constitute a subgenre of the hollowed short story tradition. Certainly, they display some distinctive literary features: a highly-condensed narrative, brief but illuminating characterization, a single overarching incident, and a flash of symbolic meaning. Many classic authors of the past such as Tolstoy, Joyce, Crane, and Hemingway have richly contributed to the growing corpus of mini-short stories.

In "A Fresh Festoon of Mini-Short Stories," author Leif E. Trondsen presents a new collection of 10 of these "truncated tales" to his readers. This book is a follow up work to his earlier "The Art of the Mini-Short Story" and "A New Assortment of Mini-Short Stories." The author has matured greatly in his writing style, characterization, and literary insights since the publication of these two books. Trondsen, nevertheless, continues to favor storylines involving religious and supernatural themes.

The 10 mini-short stories included in this volume cover a wide range of literary genres, such as horror, science fiction, satire, and social commentary. All, however, conclude with Trondsens tell-tale "twist" endings, in the style of his favorite short story writers Edgar Allen Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Saki, and O. Henry. A sampling of these new mini-short stories includes: "The Question," an unsettling tale based upon the biblical story of Job, which ponders the question of "why" such momentous misfortunes afflict us all in our daily lives; "The Choice," an unusual science fiction story concerning first contact with alien life and its fateful consequences for humanity; "The Governess," a harrowing Victorian Gothic tale of a new governess and the "unusual" child for whom she must care and tutor; and "The Dance," a whimsical coming-of-age story about an adolescent boy attending his first school dance. These mini-short stories are intended to "entertain, inspire, enlighten, challenge, and, yes, even shock their readers."

Beautifully set in Perpetua type and illustrated with color photographs, "A Fresh Festoon of Mini-Short Stories" is a welcome literary departure for all readers seeking a "good read" beyond the common pale of most contemporary fiction.