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Fictions
119 pages, Paperback
Published May 7, 2024
28 people want to read
About the author
Ashley Honeysett
1 bookAshley Honeysett's debut book, Fictions, won the Miami University Press Novella Prize and the Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year Award, and is a finalist for the 2024 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 22, 2024
Read This Book If You…
📝Are a writer, especially one with dry humor
✨Enjoy fast reads
🕯️Like short stories
🌙Have undergone the triumphs and horrors of a creative writing workshop
To me, this book is like if Bunny by Mona Awad had a more existential older sister. Fictions centers around a writer as she walks readers through the countless short stories she has written, workshopped, and eventually received rejections on. The speaker’s arresting voice and well-placed dry humor helps ground readers in this book that uses an experimental and fragmentary structure. I loved being inside a writer’s mind, learning about what decisions she made and why. I also enjoyed which stories stayed with the reader throughout the entire book, and which ones were short glimpses into something bigger (Leroy the octopus was my favorite). Fictions sifts through memory, story, and family in an incredibly refreshing way and I highly recommend it to all readers, but especially writers.
📝Are a writer, especially one with dry humor
✨Enjoy fast reads
🕯️Like short stories
🌙Have undergone the triumphs and horrors of a creative writing workshop
To me, this book is like if Bunny by Mona Awad had a more existential older sister. Fictions centers around a writer as she walks readers through the countless short stories she has written, workshopped, and eventually received rejections on. The speaker’s arresting voice and well-placed dry humor helps ground readers in this book that uses an experimental and fragmentary structure. I loved being inside a writer’s mind, learning about what decisions she made and why. I also enjoyed which stories stayed with the reader throughout the entire book, and which ones were short glimpses into something bigger (Leroy the octopus was my favorite). Fictions sifts through memory, story, and family in an incredibly refreshing way and I highly recommend it to all readers, but especially writers.
June 8, 2024
"She asks me what Cathal is good at. And I tell her he loves boating and is learning how to navigate. It could be that by the time he's twelve this will really be true. Then when you wonder where he is and you worry, she says, imagine he's navigating a boat. Tell yourself a story about him. Make it a story that comforts you."
An exceptional debut that blends the stories of reality and make-believe as though the speaker and reader are fluctuating in and out of consciousness. Some stories were pieces of fiction the speaker was writing, others were scenes she herself had lived through, and its juxtaposing of the hypothetical with the concrete made me felt caught up in something dreamy and haunted. The voice is observant, matter-of-fact, humorous, and solemn in a way that I can only compare to Rachel Cusk.
I'm very glad I came across this and very eager to read more of Honeysett in the future.
An exceptional debut that blends the stories of reality and make-believe as though the speaker and reader are fluctuating in and out of consciousness. Some stories were pieces of fiction the speaker was writing, others were scenes she herself had lived through, and its juxtaposing of the hypothetical with the concrete made me felt caught up in something dreamy and haunted. The voice is observant, matter-of-fact, humorous, and solemn in a way that I can only compare to Rachel Cusk.
I'm very glad I came across this and very eager to read more of Honeysett in the future.
August 25, 2025
Fictions plants us in Honeysett’s mind as it wanders between memoir and fiction, searching for a good story. As a writer, I identified with her journey. The book perfectly captures the struggle to find fiction in real life and vice versa.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews