From Editor Christina Thompson’s introduction to the new issue of Harvard Review, number 39:

One of the most common topics of discussion here at Harvard Review involves a particular kind of story, one that lacks the full-dress feel of longer fiction and reads more like what I would call an essay. Often told in the first person and focused on a single relationship or encounter, such pieces have a reflective, meditative feel, as though the author were telling a little story in order to make a broader, often existential point. This same author, however, when asked if we can include the piece under the essay heading, will typically say, “But I made it up.”

At this point I can only throw my hands up in the air. What were all those years of relentless postmodernism good for, if not to break down the dichotomy between the fictional and the real? Fiction has always been understood to be “true” in the deepest sense, even though the characters and settings may be imagined. Likewise, what we call nonfiction has always been at least partially made up—chronologies reorganized, details fudged, some elements exaggerated, others suppressed. Actual, literal reality has never made good copy, as everyone since Herodotus has known.

So, what shall we do? Squash everything back into the old boxes? Dispense with categories altogether? Invent new terminologies for work that seems neither here nor there? In this issue we have opted for the last, adding a section called “Stories from Life” for a type of story that seems particularly close to the essayistic bone. Whether it is quite the right description for pieces that lie on the spectrum between fiction and essay remains to be seen. But we need to move past the idea that writing is fundamentally fictional or nonfictional, true or false, narrative or expository, because, for whatever the reason, that just isn’t how people are writing these days.

And check out a recent interview with Thompson over at The Review Review.