Long before there was a place on the Internet called FictionNow, there was a domain name, and the hope of one day creating a home for new short fiction.

The Internet has changed dramatically in that time, as has reading itself. We learn of breaking news from Google updates flashing across our phones. We scroll through pages, rather than turning them. The sense of where a bit of information lives on a page, and the act of flipping through pages to return to it, may soon be a thing of the past.

What hasn't changed at all though is the need to tell stories. To quote Joan Didion, "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." And, if we're lucky, those narratives resonate with others.

FictionNow has the simple mission of connecting good writers of short fiction with hungry, interactive readers. You'll find stories that honestly reflect what it's like to be alive in the 21st century -- stories that wrestle, as all good fiction must, with how to construct meaning out of the welter of untamed experience.

Funny is good. Irony never hurts. And short is just fine.

Marge Lurie, Editor