Category: Fiction

Mouth Full by Paige Lindsay

Excerpt

How many mouths have been wrapped around your forks, your spoons, and, on rare and daring occasions, your knives? Whose lips have decorated your glasses with foggy, occasionally scarlet, kisses? We have all eaten from this bowl, this simple wooden vessel. A mother, her daughter, her son and his wife, her granddaughter. It has been across the country twice and it is older than you.

Ruben's Salmon by Elise Thorburn is the winning story from our 2020 Short Fiction Contest:

Excerpt

The Fiddlehead is pleased to announce that Morgan Charles is the winner of our 2020 Creative Nonfiction Contest and $2000 prize! Morgan's story Plagued  will be featured in our upcoming Fall issue no. 285.  

Thank you to all who entered the creative nonfiction contest and congratulations to the fourteen finalists. And thanks again to our judge Ariel Gordon!

Kate Finegan's story "Blues Too Bright" won the fiction prize as part of The Fiddlehead's 26th annual literary contest. You can read an interview with her here.

Blues Too Bright

"Have you noticed the birds are shitting more lately?” Mother calls to ask. I wait for my eyes to focus and see that it’s six a.m. on the dot. I imagine she’s been sitting by the window since four, waiting for a reasonable hour to call. 

By Sarah Bernstein

At my Jewish high school in Montreal, Mordecai Richler, of course, was a bit of a hero. Whether or not he liked it, and even though he relentlessly lampooned the Jewish community, he was still one of ours. February at our school was public speaking month. So, every February, the teachers compiled and distributed a list of quotations to all of us groaning, gawky teenagers — possible speech topics from which we were to choose. . . .

By Christina Cooke

Commendations on the novel’s thematic triumphs need not be contrived by this humble author as institutions such as The New Yorker, Guardian and Financial Times have safely lionized this text as one of the most celebrated of the past two decades. But the most striking yet undervalued aspect of White Teeth, from my reading, is Smith’s awareness of the constrictions placed upon writing by those reading it — of the insistent and insufferable question demanded ad naseum, “but what does this mean?" . . .

By Holly Luhning

The practice of incorporating historical or “real-life” events in a fictional work is common. But the term “documentary fiction” isn’t one I’ve often heard applied to a novel.