How many short stories would you expect in a collection? You get plenty with Nancy Jane Moore’s Flashes of Illumination because many of them are extremely short, sparking with bright ideas. A few hundred words is not enough for a finely nuanced plot or detailed character development but it is enough to fire up the synapses. Some of the clusters pursue a path between them; others take divergent journeys from similar starting points.

In fact, my one disappointment with the book is that some of the stories seem a bit long. They might even have enough words to qualify for a regular short story collection although still down in the featherweight category. If there is a Flashes II, I hope the author uses her rich imagination to chop even the lengthier pieces into several related segments and then, lumps removed, it would be a perfect ultra-short story compendium. 4 / 5.