On a quantum level, particles can do some pretty wild stuff. They can vanish and reappear. They can display characteristics of both wave energy and physical object. They can exist in multiple realities, simultaneously.

This is a true brain bender.

It seems the smaller things get the more mysterious they become.

We have no definitive answers, really. Not yet. What short fiction attempts to convey is no different than a quantum particle and, as a lens to capture the distilled spirit of a story or action or emotion, short fiction is our great hope to unearth the theory of everything.

From a literary standpoint. 

And won't the math be easier!

It'll be beautiful. In the meantime, we have the beauty of our fascination with that which often confounds us. Nothing is new but our understanding. It's the evolution of our ability to perceive that pulls us closer to the sublime mystery short fiction strives to measure. Short fiction is not new, and our labels are wearing thin: It doesn't matter whether we call it prose poetry, flash or micro fiction, the truth is we're learning to better see this hybrid form of paradoxical expression, and it's always been here, everywhere.

Thanks to this year's Selecting Editor Roxane Gay, New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist and An Untamed State, whose Top 50 picks are sure to ripple the very fabric of space-time in which we sit. Our great fortune to have Roxane on board is cosmic.

Thanks to an outstanding Wigleaf team of Associate Editors Erin Fitzgerald, Sean Lovelace, and Marcelle Heath, with readers Shome Dasgupta, Tawnysha Greene, Brian Allen Carr, and Laura Ellen Scott.

Thanks to Scott Garson, master and commander of Wigleaf, for, well, everything, and for allowing me to serve for the past three years. It's been an honor and a privilege and, as I pass the Series Editor baton to Marcelle, I'm excited for what's to come.

—Mel Bosworth


[official p.s.—thanks also to Philip Kirk, for use of the art on the main page.]

Mel Bosworth's next book, CAMOUFLAGE COUNTRY (co-written with Ryan Ridge), is due out toward the end of the year. He's the creator and curator of the Small Press Book Review. He lives in Western Massachusetts.


To link to this directly: http://wigleaf.com/15top50foreword.htm

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