This book includes luminous stories, each told in a flash. This extraordinary collection gathers short-short stories - none longer than 1,800 words - by some of North Carolina's best contemporary writers, including Russell Banks, Doris Betts, Orson Scott Card, Fred Chappell, Sarah Dessen, Haven Kimmel, Robert Morgan, Lee Smith, Elizabeth Spencer, and Daniel Wallace. The stories are compulsively readable. The spellbinding elements of brevity, variety, and surprise conspire to keep readers flipping pages. Comic, tragic, magical, fantastical, provocative, disturbing, luminous, the short-short form proves a reliably elastic and dazzling medium for every writer featured. In one flash of literary artistry after another, these sixty-five established and emerging writers remind us why we read fiction: to laugh, to learn, to feel, to be discomfited and challenged, to be transported, and to make enlightening and enduring connections with the world outside our own skins. Long Story Short will appeal to legions of fans who already delight in reading many of the North Carolina authors included here and will introduce them to extraordinary writers they have not yet discovered.