SIMPLICITY WITH SOUL

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Coming February 18, 2027

Ran Walker has done something that took true moxie: he finished Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Not translated it, not explained it, not paid homage to it—finished it, each pilgrim with four stories each, roundtrip, in flash fiction, drabbles, kwansabas, and free verse. Canterbury is the fullest expression yet of what Ran understands about compression: that a small container, handled with enough care and verve, can hold huge life stories.

Thirty Black pilgrims travel by charter bus from Atlanta to Canterbury, Connecticut—to honor Prudence Crandall's school for Black women, to connect with their ancestors, to tell each other stories. The form mirrors the ambition: Walker writes in multiple dictions, as Chaucer wrote in multiple dictions, because a pilgrimage that contains multitudes requires a language that can hold them. The results are riotous, moving, formally dazzling, and deeply alive.

Canterbury is among the most formally inventive works of flash fiction in recent memory.

~ Grant Faulkner,
co-founder of 100 Word Story and the Flash Fiction Institute, and author of The Art of Brevity