In the United States, early forms of flash fiction can be found in the 19th century, notably in the figures of Walt Whitman, Ambrose Bierce, and Kate Chopin.
[18] Practitioners have included Saadi of Shiraz ("Gulistan of Sa'di"), Bolesław Prus,[5][19] Anton Chekhov, O. Henry, Franz Kafka, H. P. Lovecraft, Yasunari Kawabata, Ernest Hemingway, Julio Cortázar, Daniil Kharms,[20] Arthur C. Clarke, Richard Brautigan, Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Fredric Brown, John Cage, Philip K. Dick, and Robert Sheckley.
[22] Also notable are the 62 "short-shorts" which comprise Severance, the thematic collection by Robert Olen Butler in which each story describes the remaining 90 seconds of conscious awareness within human heads which have been decapitated.
[23] Contemporary English-speaking writers well known for their published flash fiction include Kathy Fish, Venita Blackburn, Amber Sparks, Lydia Davis, David Gaffney, Robert Scotellaro, and Nancy Stohlman, Sherrie Flick, Bruce Holland Rogers, Steve Almond, Barbara Henning, Grant Faulkner.
[24] In his collection La mitad del diablo (Páginas de Espuma, 2006), Juan Pedro Aparicio included the one-word story Luis XIV, which in its entirety reads: "Yo" ("I").
[25] German-language authors of Kürzestgeschichten, influenced by brief narratives penned by Bertolt Brecht and Franz Kafka, have included Peter Bichsel, Heimito von Doderer, Günter Kunert, and Helmut Heißenbüttel.
SmokeLong Quarterly, founded by Dave Clapper in 2003, is "dedicated to bringing the best flash narratives to the web whether written by widely published authors or those new to the craft.
[30] In a CNN article on the subject, the author remarked that the "democratization of communication offered by the Internet has made positive in-roads" in the specific area of flash fiction, and directly influenced the style's popularity.