Just Desserts

These 58 short-short stories by a recognized expert in flash fiction, Miriam N. Kotzin, demonstrate a narrative craft that captures the poignance-and humor-of the human condition. "Haunting, powerful stories, succinct, taut and precise, funny and poignant snapshots of a lifetime by a gifted writer. Miriam Kotzin's tales vividly evoke childhood, peach season, sensual and thwarted love, cemeteries and noirish motels, pawn shops and smoky bars. You won't forget Just Desserts." --David Evanier "The finely wrought stories of Miriam Kotzin's Just Desserts are short but not small. Ordinary objects like a corsage, a casserole or even two .38s in a drawer like birds in a nest in these scenes become quietly totemic, while people glimpsed and overheard become representative without losing particularity and dignity. Kotzin's precise and spare but vivid imagery circulates like electricity. It's amazing to witness how much narrative momentum and resistance can be summoned with such brevity, and after each story passes, its essence persists, like smoke after a fire. A good fire, a very good fire." -- R. T. Smith "Just Desserts is a superior collection of flash fiction. Miriam Kotzin writes a condensed but expressive prose, which excels at not only offering the reader glimpses into the various (and fabulously diverse) characters but also at regularly achieving a spine-tingling effect. In the drum-taut Just Desserts less is certainly more. And then some." --Nathan Leslie