The End of The Beginning
Jenna Heller
Winner of the ATB | ITK 2023 award for flash fiction
With plots that hinge on moments of unease, betrayal, or violence, these small stories turn on becoming and unforeseen departures.
ISBN: 978-1-0670089-1-8
Format: Paperback, 70pp
RRP: NZ $25.00
Category: Flash fiction
Publication: 13 June 2024
Order by email: info@atthebay.org
Please contact us with
- Number of copies
- Shipping address
We will send you the invoice, including shipping costs and payment methods.
About the book
A tornado rips the roof from a strip mall. A girl is scorched by her own reflection. A daughter enacts revenge for her mother’s grotesquely inappropriate remarks. An unwell man prepares to leave his home and community for the last time. A woman contemplates her impending transformation into a sea creature, while another, gifted with second sight, finds that ghosts start to outnumber the living.
With plots that hinge on moments of unease, betrayal, or violence, these small stories turn on becoming and unforeseen departures. Ranging from North America to Aotearoa New Zealand, they move through the captured time of childhood memory to the vastness of geological time as experienced by an escaping moon, and often, they lean into a queer and ecologically inflected Gothic.
Cover art Catherine Macdonald
Brilliant, tender, and spare. – Frankie McMillan
With a delicate but strong sense of narrative voice, Jenna Heller has seized the flash form and made it her own. – Tina Shaw
These slim yet sumptuous stories ripple with wonder and warmth. They are also ruthless. Nothing under the sun escapes Jenna Heller’s sharp-eyed perception. The End of the Beginning is flash fiction at its finest. – Michelle Ross
These small stories lean into a dark humour that scratches at the unease in relationships like a succession of brutal jokes. Jenna Heller is attentive to the ‘suitcase behind the smile’, to life as it is lived and its multiple alternate personalities. – Alison Glenny
About the author
Jenna Heller is an award-winning flash fiction writer including: National Flash Fiction Day in 2020, joint-winner of the Meniscus Australian CLA Best Prose Prize 2019, runner-up in the North & South Short, Short Story Contest 2019. Her flash appears in the international anthology Best Small Fictions 2020, 2021, and 2023. She lives in Ōtautahi Christchurch.