Happy Saturday, friends.

For a long time I've been meaning to get hold of a book, any book, by the late Leonard Dubkin, a Chicago nature writer whose name recurred in my reading of other nature writers for years. If for no other reason, I can't resist a crime reporter who got fired from a newspaper because he was distracted watching squirrels while a murderer slipped away. Recently I read at last Dubkin's 1972 book, My Secret Places: One Man’s Love Affair with Nature in the City, and it was more than worth the time and effort it took to find myself a decent copy. (If any publishers out there are looking for a worthy forgotten writer whose works deserve republication and rediscovery, this is my hot tip to you! Put me down for a preorder of the full set.)

Looking for then finding that book — and having an unpleasant experience with a shady bookjacker along the way — made me think about the serendipity of reading and of formative encounters in a library or a bookstore, or on the shelves of a youth hostel with limited choices when we definitely need to take something with us to read on the next leg of our trip whether or not it's what we would have picked up otherwise. Like the secret places Dubkin discovers around Chicago — a grotto full of bats in an undeveloped space behind buildings, or an urban meadow hidden by billboards — so many of the books and writers that have shaped me the most came by chance and surprise. And keeping Necessary Fiction bobbing along for the last fifteen-plus years has been that way too, making friendships and connections with other writers and their work I wouldn't have known otherwise. I hope reading our website, and perhaps even this newsletter, helps you make those connections, too. 

So what have we brought you this week?

We started the week with What Happened Was, a story collection by Katherine Haake, published by 11:11 Press and reviewed by Patrick Thomas Henry. He has written reviews for us several times in the past and we're always glad to have him back. 

This week's story is "The Dead Mall" by Jamie Iredell. Jamie was one of the earliest writers we published on the site, way back in August 2009, and he also contributed to our Writers In Residence series while we were doing that, so it's a pleasure to feature new work from him.

And in research notes, DeMisty D. Bellinger wrote about All Daughters Are Awesome Everywhere, winner of the Barbara DiBernard Prize in Fiction from University of Nebraska Press. DeMisty has shared research notes with us in the past, for her novel New To Liberty, and we also published her story "Cat, Catfish, Cat" in 2016.

In contributor news, Alice's Big Book of Mistakes by contributor Alice Kaltman (read her research notes for Dawg Town here)  is forthcoming this month from Word West Press.

These Strange Bodies by Court Ludwick, who has written several book reviews for us, is forthcoming from ELJ Editions.

And Civil Twilight by Simon Frueland and translated from Danish by contributor K.E. Semmel, is reissued this month in a new edition from Spuyten Duyvil. Here are some research notes we published for an earlier edition.

Finally, because I haven't mentioned it in a while, here's the list of books we currently have available to reviewers. If you're interested in writing a review of any of these, you'll find contact information at the top of the list.

Until next week, thanks for reading,
Steve Himmer

PS With all the nonsense happening these days on the platform I'll just keep calling Twitter, it's uncertain how long it will remain available and reliable. It's already a site we'd rather not be using and tacitly supporting that way, but it's still we're most of our followers are. So if you find this newsletter worth receiving and reading, may I ask you to please share it with other writers and readers who might also like to receive it? I'd love to move our audience away from Twitter toward this space over which we have more control and fewer unintentional associations. Thanks.