The week’s best online fiction, with recommendations from FictionDaily’s editors.
“Identity” by William Tekede, StoryTime Africa
I’m literally speechless. This story is too good. There’s leaving and getting and tragedy and politics and words. The words! The sentences flow out like nature. I’m just gushing. This is a gushing review. I could relate it to all kinds of ideas–colonialism, family, the tragedy of emancipation, the master-slave dialectic, the mulatto’s curse, ex-centricity from one’s self…I could go on. But I can’t. I refuse to elaborate. Any ideas brought to the story threaten to alienate it and it’s already such a beautiful account of alienation that I can’t bring myself to alienate it any more than it already is alienated. Which was done of its own will. It’s therefore reconciled to alienation to become one with itself. It does what I want to do. I want to do that. Does that make sense? Probably not. But nothing does. Wait. This story does. It makes complete sense. Please read it to find out.–Reviewed by David Backer
“The Jewelry Party” by David Backer, Metazen
Following up David Backer’s kind take on my “Tuna Fish” piece last week, I’ll write n admiring word or two on his “Jewelry Party.” (This may smack of the incestuous, passing our limited space here at Full Stop from one FictionDaily editor to the next in the clannish, self-serving online fiction community’s equivalent of “snowballing,” for lack of a more off-putting conceit. But then, to affect that the online fiction community is any less close-knit, or that such camaraderie does not exist, would possibly be a greater disfavor to Full Stop’s readers and a graver blow to my credibility.) The fact remains that “Jewelry Party” is an intriguing piece. At its basis is a concept difficult to pull off artfully, but David more than does it justice, communicating the story’s action through an extended exercise in costumery and word play, to the dramatic entrance of Last to Arrive – “small, unexpected, a wonder to behold.” Metazen welcomes “neurotic characters, obscure philosophies, love for inanimate objects and quests toward enlightenment.” I can see why David’s is their kind of party–Reviewed by Ryan Nelson
The Bastards Were Everywhere and Would Endure by William Taylor Jr., Redfez
It has become almost trite to applaud an author for “making the setting a character all itself,” and so it is a delight to see William Taylor Jr. turn that practice on its head by making characters into setting in “The Bastards Were Everywhere and Would Endure.” William Taylor Jr. answers the question of where his story takes place by describing who inhabits it. His setting—an unnamed neighborhood that could fester into being from any stretch of suburbia—is comprised of the various characters, pitiable and vile alike but all pathetic. They are the focus of the story and the casual result of their pettiness, brutality and boredom is what provides a surprisingly compelling plot. Taylor achieves more than just cleverness in his inversion of the traditional roles of character and setting, though—it gives his story a omnipresence: A sense that the forces of weariness, sickness and ignorance that animate his Bastards are everywhere and that our heroes are those who must endure despite them.–Reviewed by Matt Funk
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