When my friends recommend books, I borrow them from the library—my apartment remains infested with paperbacks despite my efforts to downsize, and books are an expensive vice—but I lasted a whole fifteen minutes into the audiobook of Julia Armfield’s novel Our Wives Under the Sea before I caved and ducked into a bookstore to buy it while out on a walk. It was just that good.
The Fiddlehead is excited to announce the finalists of our 2024 Creative Nonfiction Contest, judged by Lorri Neilsen Glenn! The winner of the $2000 contest prize will be announced in October and the winning essay will appear in the Autumn 2024 issue (301). Thank you to all who entered and congratulations to the following fifteen finalists!
It is a joy for a non-scientist like me to lose myself in descriptions of the exquisitely designed life cycles of pecan trees, maple trees, wild strawberries, witch hazel, black ash, and cattails.
Hannah Green’s Xanax Cowboy is a long poem—a total of 128 pages—that interrogates
This is my year of reading short story collections, and this book exploded my understanding of what you could do with the “novel in short stories” form. The dust jacket describes it as a novel, and it follows a single protagonist, named Nina. But many of the stories that comprise it were published separately and several made it into collections like The Journey Prize anthology, and that’s because they make such powerful use of the condensed tension of the short story.
