Magazine Review: F(r)iction No. 10 | Spring 2018
I popped by a Barnes & Noble on Monday, and this is one of the things I picked up - an issue of the fascinating and beautiful literary magazine F(r)iction.
F(r)iction Series, Issue #10, Spring 2018. Published triannually by Tethered by Letters.
Leaving aside the content for a moment, this magazine is gorgeous. There is original art accompanying everything and it is magnificent. It is printed with paper of quality as mentioned and there is not a single advertisement anywhere to be found.
So, with that, it's time to turn to the content. Everything here is very good and occasionally exceptional. I loved the short stories, especially the first one - a bunch of explorers ascending the Piano - and "Once, A Little Blue Frog Told His Mother No" which - of its story I'll say nothing - does some fascinating things with structure in formatting it, until the end, in three columns. It adds a good deal of interesting depth to it.
The nonfiction essays are all fascinating reads, too, albeit each in different ways. The feature from the Afghan Women's Writing Project - mentioned on the cover - was especially saddening and heartbreaking to me.
Two features I enjoyed a great deal were the interviews, the first of them with new author Aimee Molloy, about her book The Perfect Mother (and including an excerpt) the second with comedy writer Christopher Moore and including an excerpt of his next book Midsummer.
The graphic fiction "Snow Brigade" plays with color, associating different threads of the plotline with color - in this case, blue, and red. Already beautiful, the meeting of both colors is striking. The story itself is melancholic and affecting.
There is also poetry. If I had to pick a favorite, I would go with "The Humanitad." But I lack experience and knowledge of poetry, so I can't say if any of it was truly excellent or not. I didn't really have any particular favorites.
I'm not saying much about the content itself. Can you tell? Have you noticed? I don't want to talk too much about them. I think they'd have much more an impact from reading.
One theme runs through almost everything here in some form or another: rebellion. F(r)iction's staff called this, it seems, "The Uprising Issue," though I can't find that name anywhere inside the magazine itself. But in some way or another, it's present in almost everything. Stories of different realities and undoing convention. An optimistic rebellion, as it were. To paraphrase the editor's note, they rebel not to fight against an enemy, but upward, toward the goal. Uprising. "Up" and "rising."
Sometimes, it's a rebellion of more metaphysical import: F(r)iction is unafraid to publish literary genre fiction. "Umbrus" falls under science fiction, and "Ascending Notes" falls under... well, who knows where? Literary fiction, perhaps. If Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" - that tale about some poor sod that already has an unhappy life and wakes up a cockroach (I haven't actually read it...) - is literary fiction, than we must consider "Ascending Notes" literary fiction, based purely on if X premise is 'literary' than so must Y premise.
In this way, F(r)iction challenges the traditional literary magazine. To quote the website:
F(r)iction is weird, in every respect.
It was a magnificent read and I, for one, quite enjoyed my time reading. I fully expect to return to it in the future. If I had some excess money, I might purchase for myself a two-year subscription - just $50. If you bought those same six issues at Barnes & Noble for as much as I spent on a single issue, you'd be paying about $90.
Maybe one day!
Also good to read was the "About the Authors & Artists" page. I may well go around and see about digging up some more work by the authors I enjoyed most in this issue, see what else they've done. Certainly, I now have a burning desire to read Christopher Moore's Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal.