A couple of handy book rules normally hold true. Avoid gimmick books—holiday anthologies, blog-to-print money grabs, any deep dive into a flaky food subject like the kumquat or the persimmon. And, most of the time, avoid books that fit into your back pocket—slight often means slight. “Hint Fiction: An Anthology of Stories in 25 Words or Fewer,” edited by Robert Swartwood, is on the wrong side of both of these rules, yet it’s an interesting, often thrilling collection, not because it rewards our shrinking attention spans, but because the best of these stories transcend the gimmick and are complete, elegant moments of fiction.

In an introduction of significantly more than twenty-five words, Swartwood surveys the range of fiction—the familiar novel, novella, and short story, and their miniaturized, rarer cousins, “sudden fiction, flash fiction, micro fiction, drabble, dribble,” all apparently real and distinct styles. (Sudden fiction checks in between one and five pages; flash is between three hundred and a thousand words; micro gets you about a hundred and fifty words; a drabble has a hundred words, a dribble fifty.) What, then, are the six-word memoirs that the SMITH has been collecting in its handful of books since 2008? Well, short—and modelled on the Hemingway six-worder “For Sale: baby shoes, never worn.” (Swartwood points out in his introduction to “Hint Fiction” that Hemingway’s authorship of this gem may be apocryphal.)

“Hint Fiction” gives writers a little more room to roam. A hinting story, Swartwood explains, should do in twenty-five words what it could do in twenty-five hundred, that is, it “should be complete by standing by itself as its own little world.” And, like all good fiction, it should tell a story while gesturing toward all the unknowable spaces outside the text.

The book is divided into three sections: “life & death,” “love & hate,” and “this & that.” Several stories too fully embrace the gimmick, becoming tiny O. Henry tales complete with tidy setups and kickers. Something about the space constraints make the stories go for too much, rejecting intimacy for some trumped up idea of scale. The best, however, share an off-beat and generally macabre sensibility. Here are two good examples:

“Blind Date,” by Max Barry.

She walks in and heads turn. I’m stunned. This is my setup? She looks sixteen. Course, it’s hard to tell, through the scope.

“Houston, We Have a Problem,” by J. Matthew Zoss.

I’m sorry, but there’s not enough air in here for everyone. I’ll tell them you were a hero.

Violence is a lingering theme, often conveyed with a power that lasts long after the short time it takes to read these tales. Take “Cull,” By L. R. Bonehill, a compressed post-apocalyptic snapshot:

“There had been rumors from the North for months. None of us believed it, until one night we started to kill our children too.

My favorites, though, embrace the form’s brevity, and fill these small shapes with exuberance:

“Shipwrecked,” by Bob Thurber.

After we buried the captain, we salvaged the Victrola. It worked, though the mahogany was ruined. Half of us put on dresses. And we danced.

“Jermaine’s Postscript to His Seventh-Grade Poem Assignment,” by Christoffer Molnar.