Info & Guidelines

Necessary Fiction is a webjournal delivering a fresh story each Wednesday. We also host a monthly Writer In Residence, offer book reviews, and have serialized a novel (which is now available as an ebook).

You can reach us at editor@necessaryfiction.com, and we can also be found on Facebook and Twitter. NF is edited by Steve Himmer, just so you know who to blame. The book reviews editor is Michelle Bailat-Jones, and our bloggers are Jess Stoner and Renee Zambo.

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Submitting Fiction

We welcome your stories, but ask that you send them via our submissions manager. Complete guidelines are available there.

Please do not submit work to our Writers In Residence — they do not read submissions, and are here to share work they have already chosen. Also, please note that Writers In Residence are selected by invitation only, not by application or request.

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Submitting for Necessary Reviews

We are interested in reviewing fiction from independent publishers, with a moderate emphasis on short story collections, novellas and translations. We are also interested in spotlighting recent issues of literary journals. Self-published authors are welcome to submit their books, but please be aware a review is not guaranteed.

If you’re a publisher, author, or publicist and would like to submit a book for consideration, please query Michelle Bailat-Jones at reviews@necessaryfiction.com. Michelle lives in Switzerland and is aware that international postage can run high. She is happy to receive books electronically when this is a possibility.

If you are a reviewer, please (keep in mind our interest in independent publishers and then) query Michelle with a completed review or writing samples and a book suggestion.

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Submitting for Research Notes

If you’ve recently published a book of fiction (or are about to) and would like to contribute to our Research Notes series, please feel free to pitch us by email with a description of the book and a quick summary of what you might have to say about the research. No promises we’ll be able to use everything, because we really are concerned with research, not just where a book came from, but we’re also hoping to define research broadly — from the archival to the experimental to the experiential — so it won’t hurt to ask. Also, if there’s a recent book or author you’d like to suggest we invite to contribute to the series, we’re open to that, too.