Good morning on this last Saturday in November. There's frost on the ground here, at least, if not the snow that feels overdue and that I've been envying in photos shared on Bluesky (like these from Julian Hoffman in Greece).

A new dog joined the staff at Necessary Fiction this week, a 4-5 Australian Cattle Dog rescue named Canyon, so I've been getting used to walking again with the kind of attention that only comes when you're moving through the neighborhood or the landscape at the pace of someone stopping and starting and backtracking and circling according to the patterns of their own map. I've also spent the past couple of days, on this brief break from teaching, reading student thesis novels and catching up on the submissions queue at NF, both of which have felt like a privilege and like another opportunity to navigate the landscape with a map drawn by somebody else. Even when it's a map that doesn't lead me where I expected or wanted to go, I'm grateful for the chance to see the world as it looks to another.

And these are some views of the world we shared this week on the site:

On Monday, Chiara Naomi Kaufman reviewed Lesser Ruins by Mark Haber, published by Coffee House Press who are having a very appealing sale on their website today, with quite a few books we've reviewed and/or published the authors of available. This is Chiara's first appearance in our pages and we're glad to be sharing her work.

This week's story was "Is There Still Gold In the American River?" by Selen Ozturk, another writer new to our pages, whose stories I'm excited to read more of elsewhere.

And in research notes, Midge Raymond wrote about her novel Floreana, recently published by Little A. She's also new to our pages but we've featured or reviewed several books from Ashland Creek Press, of which she's a co-founder.

I hope the week ahead is a good one for you, and as always, thanks for reading.

Steve Himmer