It has been my pleasure to read and review the longlist these past months, to sit back and enjoy again and again these very short fictions, to spend this time discovering authors new to me and learning nearly by heart their stories. What company their narrators and characters have been, especially during this time of loneliness and grief the world over. And so, ultimately, it is connection—losing it, longing for it, reaching toward it—that brings together this year's Wigleaf Top 50. You are not alone, these stories say, even when their narrators couldn't possibly feel or believe otherwise.

As I whittled down the 200+ longlist, I was guided by the ideas of others, which I have taught in the past as characteristics of the best flash fiction. Like Robert Swartwood, I looked for these four things in each flash: (1) that it tells a story; (2) that it entertains; (3) that it is thought-provoking; and (4) that it inspires an emotional response. To this list I added something from Mark Strand—that these tiny stories achieve in a page or two what novels do in two or three hundred. And, finally, what Dinty W. Moore says about how exceptionally brief fictions can bring you to a point of recognition and then just leave you there, suspended.

Without further ado, I present to you this year's Wigleaf Top 50.
Yours,
Molly Gaudry

Molly Gaudry is the author of We Take Me Apart, Desire: A Haunting, and the forthcoming Fit Into Me (Ampersand Books). She is an Assistant Professory of Creative Writing and Literature at Stony Brook University.

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