Editor's Statement

by Mark Mirsky

As the editor of Fiction, I have been frustrated by our inability to bring out more issues annually and devote a larger number of pages to all the fiction that is submitted to us or that we could publish with pleasure. Our mission is to extend the experiment in writing that questions the border between fantasy and reality; and to find worlds of imagination in cities and countries that are hardly known, or not known at all.

I remain committed to print, a love that began in childhood with books, a love that matured under the guidance of my late friend, Donald Barthelme. Donald's attention to the way his books were printed, to the look of Fiction's pages, as its original designer and layout engineer, and happily for me, a book of my own, The Secret Table, remains an inspiration. Donald, though he loved "HOT TYPE," was willing to design and work with offset printing from photographic plates. Technology advances and with it opportunities present themselves. The Web hopefully will mature to return to the human eye, and the touch of human fingers, some of the feel and look of books that are set by hand. Meanwhile it offers us at the magazine the chance to make available more of the excitement we experience as editors when fiction we want others to see is submitted. I am adding a piece of my own to this first collection printed in Web form under the magazine's sponsorship, and I hope other writers who have published in the magazine will join me. We want these Web pages to reflect not just individual writers but a community ready to read each other's work and to exchange ideas.