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"Over the past ten years or so, "Short-shorts" or "Flash Fiction" has emerged as an increasingly popular and visible genre within fiction. David Galef's Brevity offers a guide to the genre for creative writing students by combining discussions of the various approaches and methods within the genre, examples of the form, and prompts for students to develop their own writing. Galef includes examples of the short-short genre from such writers as Collette, Donald Barthelme, and Borges. He examines the ways in which these authors drew on the form and how compression and other techniques are able to produce works of power, humor, or insight. Galef argues that developing one's skills in the short-short form can also carry over to other forms of writing. Galef, a writer and longtime creative-writing instructor, guides the reader through these stories and techniques and also provides exercises based on the content or technique employed in the stories" --