Necessary Fiction

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The Pop Star’s First Solo Concert

Tina S. Zhu

The pop star asks her father to do her a favor during their family’s annual ski trip. He does not understand what for or why, as she has previously never expressed much enthusiasm for his hobby of skiing but did enjoy drinking hot chocolate and making snow angels, but he lugs a tripod and his

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Recent posts

  • On Earth As It Is Beneath

    Benjamin J. Murphy

    “In the end, we’re all free because in the end, we’ll be dead.” This fatalistic maxim is the epigraph of Ana Paula Maia’s slim novel On Earth As It Is Beneath, translated by Padma Viswanathan from the Portuguese. Linking liberation to death, the phrase is attributed to Bronco Gil, a prison inmate who first appears…

  • Sometimes An Island

    Ellen Meeropol

    I always wonder how other writers let go of their characters, because I can’t. 

  • The Tea Witch

    Ashley Burnett

    The tea witch knows that watched pots do, in fact, boil. She knows because she watches them now, all ten of them, full of nettle and barley and sugar cane. Plumes of steam rise and heat her face and pain her fingertips. She breathes in deeply and smells the rosemary and the spearmint and the…

  • An interview with Milo Todd

    Aiden Grace Smith

    Milo Todd‘s novel, The Lilac People (Counterpoint Press), a national best-seller, was named a Stonewall Honor Book and an American Library Association Notable Book. The Lilac People is the story of a trans man and his girlfriend who are ripped from their best lives by the ascent of Hitler, the Holocaust, and the subsequent liberation by the Allies…

  • The Last Quarter of the Moon

    Katy Dycus

    In Chi Zijian’s The Last Quarter of the Moon, the nameless narrator, an elder of the Evenki – nomadic reindeer herders in northeast China – recounts her ninety years of life. The loves and losses of her private world reflect outward changes as modernity, nation-building, and the extraction of local natural resources encroach upon her…

  • We Are All Having Fun Here

    Meg Mullins

    Writing requires invention. Choosing which words, which scenes that will make the beginnings, the middles, and the ends is an inherently creative act. And yet we all know that writers cannot possibly invent the world.

  • Covalent Bonds

    Myles Varga

    After Personal Rorschach #2 & #3 She is kneeling on the beach. It is brisk and the wind nips at her dress, the hemmed ends snapping like the pedipalps of some insect. Next to her is a five gallon bucket, sitting askew in the wet sand. She thrusts her fingers into the small pebbled stones,…

  • An Interview with Yasmina Din Madden

    Kim Magowan

    If you’re a fan of short fiction and flash fiction, there’s a good chance you’ve read one of Yasmina Din Madden’s gorgeous, funny, harrowing stories. For years, I have been eagerly waiting for Yasmina’s debut collection You Know Nothing (Curbstone Press).  Yasmina and I first met at my first-ever AWP in Washington DC in 2017;…

  • The Hitch

    Edith-Nicole Cameron

    Sara Levine has mastered at least two of the linchpins of compelling fiction: an irresistible narrative voice and a fatally flawed protagonist. Her debut novel, Treasure Island!!! (2011) featured an unreliable (and unhinged) narrator who kickstarts her life by embracing what she considers the “core values” of Robert Louis Stevenson’s original Treasure Island: “Boldness! Resolution!…

  • Witness

    Vincent James Perrone

    We’re going to kidnap my mother. Tamara and I.  My mother would say, “Shell, don’t go getting your friends into trouble,” before turning back to watch the World Series of Poker, a deck spread out on the coffee table to play along with. Maybe the mutter of, “And don’t disturb me,” as she juggles her…