Flash Fiction

The book blog titled "The story as one-liner" in today's Guardian newspaper talks about a literary form that's new to me: Flash Fiction. It's basically a very, very short story of 2,000 words or less...sometimes much, much less. Here's a example pulled from the article.

Untitled by Ernest Hemingway
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

Flash fiction is nothing new, but in this age of distraction, it's becoming more popular. What differentiates it from poetry or even a joke isn't always clear to me:

My Father by Mike Topp
My father was a snowman.
He got depressed and blew his brains out with a hair dryer.

Obviously, it takes some skill to write effective Flash Fiction. If you want to learn more about it, checkout the Wikipedia entry, which also has several links to websites and articles.