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New sudden fiction
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New sudden fiction is a sub-category of the new and emerging genre short-short story. Robert Shapard and James Thomas, literary critics and editors of many anthologies of this emerging genre were the ones who in 2007 decided to split the short-short story, or sudden fiction, a former name for the contemporary genre, into two new sub-genres: the new sudden fiction and the flash fiction. On the sub-genre There is very little theory on the short-short story and hardly any on the "new sudden fiction". There are anthologies. Notwithstanding, it might be said that the new sub-category is more akin to the traditional short story regarding structure than its counter-sub-genre the flash fiction. José Flávio Nogueira Guimarães in his master's thesis The Short-Short Story: a New Literary Genre states that "stories of 1/3 of a page to 750 words or two pages are different not only because of their brevity and lack of space to fully develop a plot and characterization, but seem to evoke a single idea or moment, have a reversal, usually comic, in which the initial circumstances of the plot are reversed at the end and as a result are called flash fictions. Meanwhile, stories of one to five pages or 1,000 to 2,000 words, also experimental, which, however, share features more akin to the traditional short story, are called new sudden fictions" (65). Furthermore, the author avers "that this sub-classification need not be considered a rigid one in its turn" (65), there are stories that may be seen as the hybrid of a hybrid since Guimarães considers the short-short story a hybrid genre. Reader's preferences The two anthologists, Robert Shapard and James Thomas, conducted a research in the first years of our current millenium , recruiting writers, editors, and other readers, asking them to rate the best short-shorts they had found so far. The results were that suddens, not the flashes, got the most 10s from their readers - new sudden fictions were everywhere then, even more than flash fictions (Shapard and Thomas, "New Sudden Fiction" 16-17). It is perhaps not surprising that the less radical form pleases readers better than the unconventional form, for again the new sudden fiction is more akin to the traditional short story than the flash fiction. Nevertheless, on the other hand, currently, it is seen that the flash fiction has become much more popular than the new sudden fiction. The flash fiction with all its postmodern features suits contemporaneity more naturally than its counter-sub-genre. Regarding those two sub-genres, Guimarães foresees that "further research on the short-short story might focus on how generic boundaries tend to blur as new examples of each form emerge. It has been frequently hypothesized, for example, that every genre has a trajectory in which a form develops as a deviation from an earlier one, reaches its peak of quality, and then is so repeated that it becomes overused and begets its successor. One might expect that the short-short will develop further “wrinkles,” new subjects, new modes of narration from the most current tendency, the flash fiction" (65-66). See Also * Short-short story * Flash fiction * Short story References & Further Reading * Shapard, Robert and Thomas, James (ed.) New Sudden Fiction: Short-Short Stories from America and Beyond, W.W. Norton & Company, New York and London (2007). 
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