Inconveniently enough, certain essential staffmembers of The Fabulist have recently become Employed, which means a greatly reduced volume of Internet ephemera coming across the house Facebook and Twitter feeds throughout the week.
It’s also the case that The Fab’s summer program of publishing an original work of short fiction or poetry (almost) every week is now at an end.
Forthcoming this fall is a great lineup of stories and fragments exploring fantastical and extraordinary lives, worlds and incidents — almost all in the most ordinary of places.
- September brings “The Hospital: A Game for Lovers,” by Jenny Bitner, a sweetly compassionate fantasy of love and convalescence, and of real life and death. It is a companion to her earlier contribution “Hansel & Me”; both are excerpted from her unpublished novel “Here is a Game We Can Play.”
- In October, don’t mind the gnawing sense of dread that comes with reading “A Secret Mother,” by John Zic. An immersive and grippingly sociopathic narrative, it is also the first thriller The Fabulist has ever published.
- Likewise, “Household Gods,” by Tara Isabella Burton, is The Fab’s first horror story. It is a delusional nightmare entirely lacking in ghosts or ghouls, but in no short supply of shocking turns for the worse. Happy Halloween.
- In November two fragments by Hugh Behm-Steinberg, “Krishna” and “Good Luck,” tell of a magic flute and the sexual healing of the world (beautiful, breezy and brief), and of luck and the undeserving.
- December closes out 2014 with “In Our Hearts Risen,” by Olga Zilberbourg. This tale of an aberrant android’s retirement beautifully inverts the brutality and degradation so often afforded such characters in science fiction.
Submissions update
Coming up in 2015 The Fabulist hopes to publish at least two works of fiction or poetry monthly. We receive about 15 to 20 submissions monthly, many of exceptional quality or promise, and we spend a great deal of time agonizing over each one.
As a result our response time is rather prolonged, and we do not begrudge any author withdrawing if their work is accepted in another publication.
