Necessary Fiction

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A World With No Shore

Elizabeth Smith

In 1887, three men disappeared while attempting to reach the North Pole by hot air balloon; thirty years later their remains are found on a bleak, frozen island along with rusted canisters contain photographic film. Some is undamaged enough by its three-decade-long incarceration in ice to allow experts at the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology […]

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Recent posts

  • The Dogs

    Dave Fromm

    In all of the versions of this story there are dogs. The dogs roam in a pack – fifty, a hundred maybe – wild and unmanageable. The wooded area where the dogs roam is thick with brambles and nobody can get close enough to count. Nobody tries, either. Most of the dogs are big and […]

  • Hope For The Worst

    Rosalia Scalia

    Tackling the large and small issues of the day through a series of notebook entries and letters, Hope for the Worst, Kate Brandt’s lyrical debut novel, offers many finely cut gems while showing how a young woman develops from a passive observer to a full participant in her own life. An idealistic and naïve young […]

  • My Heart Is Like a Norwegian Fjord 

    Brandon Forinash 

    It is like a lonely lighthouse at the mouth of some Norwegian fjord. It is like a lonely lighthouse set on a rocky island at the mouth of a Norwegian fjord that is leaning ever so slightly against an easterly gale. The leaning lighthouse is a matter of some concern to the little fjordic town […]

  • Dislocations

    Shara Kronmal

    A novel about memory and its loss, Dislocations by Sylvia Molloy is written in short chapters that feel as though they were taken from a daily journal. It is possible they were. According to the jacket copy, Dislocations is a work of fiction. But the narrator’s friend and central concern, a woman named M.L. who […]

  • Anthrosol

    Melissa Tuckman

    I can approach the Soil Renewal Zone. There are viewing stations, weathered concrete platforms, along the western periphery. I can look down into a stand of trembling aspen, or a wetland scrape, or a flowering meadow grazed by cattle. I can bring my old, broken Leica and peer through the rangefinder, framing photos I’ll never […]

  • Patterns of Orbit

    Court Ludwick

    “What would it be like to step into the waters of somewhere beyond the stars?” asks one character from Chloe N. Clark’s Patterns of Orbit. Meshing genre elements from speculative, horror, and science fiction, the twenty-five stories in the collection repeatedly pose this question, exploring what it means to be uncertain, what it means to […]

  • Flay

    Robert Warf

    4/4] The first time I shaved my legs I was ten and in a hotel room shower with a leg forward and my father guiding a razor downward. When none was left he looked up and said we were lucky I didn’t have any more yet. Yet. A word that after time became: not yet, […]

  • All The Tiny Beauties

    Mary Lannon

    In a class on the novel, my teacher, the writer Douglas Glover, wrote in large letters across the blackboard: The Novel is a Poem. Rejecting the idea that the novel reflects reality only in its plot and characters, Glover  (following his own teacher, Robert Day) contends that the novel additionally operates according to “patterns” that […]

  • , Bird

    Uyen Dang

    A number of birds filled the sky. A melancholic trace of something in their song, almost bittersweet. No one else seemed to have any interest in them. Instead, their eyes skittered across the mound, searching.  It was still the hazy rose and purple of twilight. The mound took up a corner of the heavens, blotting […]

  • Y/N

    Regan Mies

    Fanfiction is having a moment. Anne Hathaway is set to star in a film derived from a Harry Styles fanfic. Ali Hazelwood’s The Love Hypothesis initially shipped characters from Star Wars. And, of course, the wildly popular Fifty Shades of Grey series came into the world as Twilight fanfic. Yet despite its indisputable success and […]