Description:
The line between imagination and reality blurs in these forty poignant pieces written by first- and second-generation immigrant authors.
Brief description:
Mark Budman is first generation immigrant to the US. He is an engineer by training but works as a medical interpreter. His fiction has appeared in Catapult, Witness, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. He is the author of the novel My Life at First Try, published by Counterpoint, and is the co-editor of anthologies published by Ooligan Press, Persea, Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press (China), and University of Chester (UK). Learn more at markbudman.com.
Review Quotes:
The stories in Short, Vigorous Roots are as the volume's title implies: immediate and bright, brief and grasping. The immediacy and the brevity of flash fiction emphasizes how putting down roots in a new land is an incomplete process, an ongoing story of creation and survival, fragile and tenuous, yet ardent and resilient . . . In less than a thousand words, these stories cross borders and generations. Whatever belonging these characters arrive to, it will bear the marks of the past and tenaciously move forward.
-- Matt Chelf, Northwest Review