It's commencement weekend at the college where I work and after a week of meetings followed by meetings about other meetings, I ended the day on the porch drinking a beer in the sun while reading Emily Hasler's poetry collection Local Interest. Which is a terrific book, one I recommend — smart and funny and very good at patient attention to landscape and change. These lines from her poem "Forster's Tern" are in my head this morning: "the unknowable journeys / of enthusiasm." Other people's excitement and interest — or in the case of the poem, other birds' — are exciting to me, and that's what I like about this time of year on the academic calendar as I watch students I've spent a few years with moving on to the next thing. It's also what I like about publishing Necessary Fiction: being surprised, over and over, by what people write and share with us. Things I'd never notice or think about or put in a story, but when they do it seems inevitable that those things should be noticed and thought about and put in a story.

So what did our contributors write about this week?

Rebecca Biagas reviewed Lovelier, Lonelier, a novel  by by Daryl Qilin Yam. Reviewed by Rebecca Biagas. Rebecca previously reviewed Blood Feast by Malika Moustadraf, tr Alice Guthrie.

Sarah Stone interviewed Sylvia Brownrigg about her hybrid memoir The Whole Staggering Mystery: A Story of Fathers Lost and Found. Sarah has been in our pages before, writing about her novel Hungry Ghost Theater. 

Our featured story this week was  "Adultboat" by Brooke Randel. More of Brooke's writing can be found at her website.

And in research notes, Dennis James Sweeney wrote about his novel The Rolodex Happenings.

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We also have some new and forthcoming books to let you know about:

Rusty Barnes recently published his story collection Half Crime. He wrote for us about an earlier book, Mostly Redneck.

Any Person Is The Only Self, an essay collection by Elisa Gabbert, is available for preorder and will be published next month. 

Sherrie Flick's forthcoming essay collection Homing: Instincts of a Rustbelt Feminist can currently be preordered at a 20% discount with the code HOMING.

The Thing I Was Trying To Tell You, a collection of microfiction by Joseph Young, can be preordered in both hardcover and paperback from Publishing Genius.

And finally, there's nothing to preorder yet but I was thrilled to see that contributor Brian Kiteley — a favorite writer of mine — has a new novel, Jack's Book, forthcoming from Astrophil Press in 2025. I will be eagerly awaiting that one, and if you've never read Brian's work, I hope you will. Still Life With Insects and River Gods in particular are books I've gone back to again and again. Here's something I wrote about his work way back in 2011 when he was our Writer In Residence at Necessary Fiction. 

Thanks for reading,
Steve Himmer