Once into the Night

Winner of FC2’s Catherine L. Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize

Stories that explore the potent and captivating boundaries between the real and the imaginary

Aurelie Sheehan’s Once into the Night is a collection of 57 brief stories—a fictional autobiography made of assumed identities and what-ifs. What is the difference between fiction and a lie? These stories dwell in a netherworld between memory and the imagination, exploring the nature of truthtelling.

Here the inner life is granted pride of place with authenticity found in misremembered childhood notebooks, invisible tattoos, and the love life of icemen. Radical in its conception of story, this collection blurs the line between fiction, poetry, and essay, reconceiving contemporary autofiction in its own witty, poignant vernacular. The stories intersect  with and deviate from a “provable” life—a twin distinction that becomes  the source of their power.