Ashley Honeysett
2023 NOVELLA PRIZE SELECTED BY Lee Upton
May 7, 2024
ISBN 9781881163749
$17.00: Amazon, B&N
When turmoil erupts in her private life, a struggling writer finds that her real-world problems have begun to cross over into her work, leading to a quest to better understand herself as an artist. Told in a fragmentary style that blurs the line between reality and imagination, Fictions considers the everyday tolls—the personal as much as the aesthetic—of getting our longings onto the page.
Reviews & Such
- Fictions is a love letter to the curious and often deeply absurd nature of the writer’s life. Honeysett is a marvelous narrator of family, parental, and intergenerational stories, all the time wrestling with the question of how exactly stories get made. Here is a book in which imagination persists through the everyday, transforming and elevating ordinary observations into the same autofiction space out of which the writing of Ernaux, Didion, and Levy comes. Over and over again, this book took my breath away. – Annemarie Ní Churreáin, author of The Poison Glen
- Simultaneously novella-in-stories, plague journal, memoir, and meditation on writing, Ashley Honeysett’s Fictions illuminates and explores the mind of a storyteller wrestling with the essential strangeness of writing fiction at a time when a common story has eluded us all. A box of finely made enchantments. – Hugh Sheehy, author of Design Flaws
- Ashley Honeysett’s Fictions is fabulous. It’s hilarious and moving and full of the most unexpected and striking observations. Written from the perspective of a writer living in Ireland, the novella recounts the primary character’s rejections from magazines and publishers and the contradictory (and very funny) advice she receives about her writing, interleaved with the character’s accounts of her life with her young son and husband, and her reflections on a family member’s addiction, generational family dramas, cultural differences, an imagined threesome. I loved this novella, and I’m so happy that it will be out in the world. – Lee Upton, author of Visitations
- I started to say that Ashley Honeysett’s Fictions is dazzling, engrossing, urgent—words I’ve read many times about many different books. But I’ve never read a book quite like it, so I find myself searching for other words, the same way Honeysett’s narrator searches for stories and plots and protagonists that say something meaningful about being a writer, mother, daughter, sister, wife, and expat living in Dublin amid a pandemic. Full of insights, longing, and tales of false starts, Fictions poignantly evokes the artifice at the heart of all art. – Kelcey Ervick, author of The Keeper
About the Author
Ashley Honeysett has lived throughout the United States as well as in Ireland and Japan and is now raising a child with her husband outside of Chicago, where she works as a fundraiser for environmental nonprofits. She studied creative writing at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, and published poetry and prose in journals there and at Michigan State University. Fictions is her first book.
