A spinster in love with a tobacco-smoking ghost. A lonely one-eyed monster who wanders the desert. A Medieval saint who delights in her “miraculous ruine.” In Little Fortified Stories, award-winning writer Barbara Black conjures a microcosm of characters that defy convention. In these very short stories, curious worlds are encapsulated like a series of snow globes, swirling with deep emotion and teeming with strangeness. Inspired by art, music, alcoholic spirits, and what Black calls “authentic fabrications” from her own ancestry, these eclectic tales are told with an eye to the absurd. Buzzing with hypnotic intensity, Little Fortified Stories presents a world in which everything is theatre and the regular rules don’t apply.

Barbara Black writes short and flash fiction, poetry and libretti. Black’s writing appears in The Cincinnati Review, Geist, The Hong Kong Review, Prairie Fire, and CV2, and in anthologies, including Bath Flash Fiction Award 2021, and Hologram: Homage to P.K. Page. Achievements include: Fiction Finalist, 2020 National Magazine Awards; Nominated for the 2019 Writers’ Trust/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize; Winner, 2017 Writers’ Union of Canada Short Prose Competition; Winner, Federation of BC Writers Contests (Prose Poem) 2018 and (Flash Fiction) 2021/2022; and Shortlisted for the 2023 Edinburgh Flash Fiction Award. She recently won First Prize in The Plaza Prizes Microfiction Contest 2023 and also placed Second in the Flash Fiction Category. She is the author of Music from a Strange Planet (Caitlin Press, 2021), which was the winner of the 2023 Sunshine Coast Writers and Editors Society Award for Fiction, and a finalist for the 2023 International Book Awards, the 2023 Canadian Book Club Award and the 2021 Miramichi Reader's Very Best Book Awards. She lives in Victoria, BC, where she gardens and rides her trusty Triumph motorcycle.

Barbara Black's profile page

"Black’s meta-fictional fortifications detonate beyond frames to glance surrealistically on original edges of the world. Her visual provocations distil essences far and wide from Pessoa to Kafka, from Victoria to Vienna, and from little stories to universal truths."

—Michael Greenstein, The British Columbia Review