The short story is the product of print culture but is finding new ways to thrive in the internet era. This can be through print stories going viral online or, more experimentally, born-digital stories reconfiguring relationships between author, text, and reader. This chapter considers two main subcategories of born-digital short fiction. Microfictions are self-contained flash fictions predicated on absolute verbal economy. Commonly found on Twitter, they call on longer print histories of microfictional experimentation and the francophone journalistic tradition of faits-divers. The second subcategory, microserializations, drip-feeds a narrative across multiple tweets, as in Jennifer Egan’s “Black Box.” Here too the subgenre recalls earlier traditions of nineteenth-century periodical serialization and Japanese cellphone novels (keitai shosetsu). Microserializations thus reintroduce the concept of temporality into the consumption of fiction, reviving readerly anticipation and creator–audience interactivity. Digital culture thus provides exciting new horizons for the always mobile, innately transmedial short story genre.

In her analysis of the rising prominence of recent short and flash fiction, Angela Naimou considers narrative brevity as an opening to geopolitical and temporal expansiveness in her chapter on “Short, Micro, and Flash Fiction.” Measured in major prize awards, sales, or downloads, short and short-short fiction have paradoxically thrived during the spatial and temporal conceptual expansions of, for example, globalization and the Anthropocene. Naimou identifies the techniques of short fiction representing planetary stories of migration, climate crisis, and evolutionary history in works by Teju Cole, Edwidge Danticat, Rachel B. Glaser, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and George Saunders.