finding the lit: vol. 6
reviews
Welcome to finding the lit, where I share the fiction I’ve been reading and enjoying on Substack.
I’m running into this paradox with finding the lit where the more great writing I discover, the less time I have to discover more writers because I’m spending more time reading the writers I’ve already discovered!
Was that a sentence?
Anyways, in my time doing this I have found and featured twenty-five (I think)—now thirty—fiction writers in this series, most of them relatively unknown, and almost all of them (perhaps all) non-traditionally published. I am very proud of that.
More than that, I am proud of all of you. Together, we are making great literary fiction content in volume and quantity I don’t think anyone would expect of this platform.
But it’s been about a month since I did one of these, by far the longest interval between entries. There’s been a lot going on in my personal life vis-à-vis the holidays and some untimely passing-aways, and there has been a lot of non-fiction type stuff adjacent to the news that has unfortunately been intruding into my reading queue.
(Did ya’ll hear about the new president? And some Substacker who shot a health insurance CEO?)
In the meantime, I also published my novel, the big T, to what felt like resounding praise from my fellow Substackers, and for that I am incredibly grateful. Over a handful of subscribers have already been so invested that they’ve become paid subscribers and read to the end, and maybe a dozen more are making their way toward completion. In the grand scheme of fiction Substack relative to my subscriber count and the fact that I am an anonymous rando on the Internet, this feels like a huge success.
(For those of you who might be interested in a physical copy of the novel and have made it this far through this bullshit intro, let me know so I can be confident enough on interest to invest in such a thing.)
As I professed when I started this series, I look forward to reviewing some of the Substack fiction serials out there, perhaps even in the next edition, as at least one of the serials I read on Substack has come to its conclusion and another is approaching it. Once I finish the last book on the physical stack I’ve had since summertime (currently on Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time, which I’ve quite enjoyed), I’ll begin plowing through and catching up on them in earnest.
Without further ado—here’s vol. 6—
Sex sells, as they say, and I have no problem with anyone who leans into that premise as a marketing tool. I’ve done it myself, to mixed success.
But you have to back it up. If you’re going to write about fucking and its consequences, you need to be fucking good.
And
Although I am assuming that myself and the narrator don’t have much in common in terms of demographic and life experience, I found myself nodding in accordance with some of the interiority portrayed. The quote in the above Note was just one example. That’s a sign of universal themes, tapping into something greater than what this story is about on its surface. I look forward to watching emma’s fiction star rise. If there’s one word to describe their stuff, it’s raw.
I’ve been thinking a lot about ‘world building’ lately as it applies to literary fiction, as opposed to its normal genre fiction context. I think that sometimes in literary fiction it becomes ‘exposition’ too easily, which is often reviled as being tell-y and not show-y, and is therefore avoided. I’ve realized that a few parts of my novel would be better characterized as ‘world building’ rather than ‘exposition’!
Of course, maybe this story by
could be regarded as light science-fiction; but nothing in it really seemed to be be out of reach of today’s technology. The parameters of this online addiction rehab center are so clearly laid out that the story feels like it could go anywhere.In fact, we could probably do well as a society to emulate this rehab center portrayed here as we get increasingly lost in social media, especially young people. As I said in the Note above, it feels like this could be the basis of a whole novel, with each character suffering from an online addiction of a different kind.
I’ve read a couple other things by Hassania, and if they truly define their whole identity “around writing fiction, short stories, and flash fiction that my loved ones won’t read” as their bio says—well, they are off to a good start. Let’s step in for their loved ones and read some of these stories!
I was amazed to find that this story by
was borne from a Fictionistas prompt. Something like a revelation during a routine task. How anyone writes so fluidly and draws such poignancy from a prompt as in this story is beyond me. I am horrible at it.Finding beauty in the banal, though, is I think one of the things I personally do best, mostly because my actual life is so boring. But I don’t do it as well as the above description, nor do I think I could satisfyingly write “parking lot fiction”, as the subtitle of this piece billed itself. Of course, the story is not about a parking lot, which is the whole point. It’s about so much more, and I am so, so glad I have discovered Sandalore, and you should be too.
God, I love Silvio’s stuff. I’d put him slightly outside the sphere of literary fiction and into the realm of magical realism, and that’s okay. This long sentence, the use of dialogue without quotations, the gentle, memorable storytelling—Silvio is a style unto himself. And since he won’t promote himself, here I am doing it for him!
The main thing he does that I think is so cool is finding the minute pairings of the surreal with the real, inserting the fantastical into the mundane and letting reality just spin around that thing, in this case developing photos...and finding pictures the narrator couldn’t possibly have taken.
This story was the first in a little series so please read the rest as I’m doing. You won’t be disappointed.
The metaphorical balls on
to write this one in second person. But it is at no point disorienting, at no point pretentious, and at all points intriguing. I’ve read Peter before and always knew I would be including them in an ftl someday, and this latest short from them gave me every reason to. It captures the modern zeitgeist with regards to the student-parent-teacher trinity so well and brings meaning to cheating in a few ways.Teacher-inspired stories always have a special place in my heart. If there haven’t been teachers featured in any of my stories yet, they are definitely going to appear at some point. In fact, I would say that if you like my writing, Peter Shull and I tonally have very similar voice and themes (if they don’t mind me saying so), so check them out.
That’s a wrap on vol. 6!
I’ll leave you with this:
And here’s where to start with my novel, if you’re into that kind of thing:
I've too much to read already sir. FUCK. And I have my own serialized mega project to... attempt.... to run. Goddammit. And it's the holidays.
I’m forwarding this post to my loved ones right away! Let’s hope it finally changes their minds. Either way, this already means so much 🥹 Thank you for all the recs, I can’t wait to read the ones I don’t already know