Literary, Not Lyrical
Plain language, structural ambition. Sentences that earn their length. No fog machines, no inherited tricks, no prose that mistakes ornament for meaning.
The Fiction Library
Stories Built to Outlast the Telling
A curated archive of short fiction, novellas, and selected excerpts — grouped by collection, written for readers who prefer their sentences load-bearing.
All Works
The Archive, by Collection
Three ongoing collections, each with its own weather. Filter by form to find what you came for, or wander. Both are valid approaches.
The Saltwater Variations
2021 – 2023
Short Story
The Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter
A woman returns to a Maine headstone she does not remember, and finds a job she cannot quit.
Novella
The Tides That Bring Us Home
Three siblings, one inherited cottage, and a letter their mother never meant to send.
Short Story
What the Gulls Knew
A marine biologist catalogues birds, lies, and the precise taxonomy of regret.
Inland Empire
2019 – 2021
Novella
The Cartographer of Lost Highways
A gas-station philosopher in the Mojave draws maps to places that no longer exist on any official record.
Excerpt
Dust to Dust in Pioneertown
Chapter three of an unfinished western, in which a widow negotiates with the only bank that will still see her.
Short Story
The Last Stand at Yucca Flats
A retired test-site engineer receives a visitor who claims to be from 1973, and may actually be telling the truth.
Field Recordings
2023 – Present
Short Story
The Year of the Quiet Machines
An AI ethicist retires to a cabin that, against all odds, listens better than her former colleagues did.
Novella
Apartment 4B, In Perpetuity
A building refuses to be sold. A lawyer refuses to leave. A tenant, now seventy, has been paying rent since 1987.
Excerpt
Notes Toward a Post-Human Pastoral
The opening movement of a longer work-in-progress on what happens to landscape when the last reader leaves.
The Craft Notes
What You’ll Find Between the Pages
A short field guide to the editorial choices that shape this fiction library — and what to expect when you sit down with a story.
Read at Your Own Pace
Every piece is published complete — no chapter gating, no serialized paywalls, no cliffhanger-as-business-model. Sit. Stay. Read the whole thing.
Annotations Welcome
Selected stories ship with margin notes — historical references, structural choices, the occasional argument against my own prose. Read with the lights on.
Reader Note
The Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter is the kind of story that makes you stand up from your desk, walk to a window, and then stand there for a while, not quite ready to sit back down.The Hudson Review · Winter 2022 print edition
Read Onward
Fiction is one room in a larger house.
If the short stories are not quite your weather, the essays and long-form commentary sit just down the hall. Or write back — letters from readers are the part of this that I never take for granted.