We are so pleased to announce a fiction winner chosen by The Best of the Net. “Baby Teeth“by Sofia Sears, a story which also won The Solstice Magazine fiction prize, is included in The 2026 Best of the Net Anthology.
We are so grateful for Elizabeth Searle’s significant contribution as Guest Fiction Co-Editor for this 2026 Spring Issue. She has solicited outstanding writers and collaborated with compassion and insight on pieces that come through Submittable. Please do check out her bio for a list of her own passionate prose. Also welcome to Monica Jimenez, our new Assistant Fiction Editor, who brings her enthusiasm plus expertise.
We have found stories that embody cultural relevance, that probe into the moral inequities in our contemporary world. John Addiego’s “What I Assume” is a compelling tale of a down-on-his-luck gambler living on a bus as it travels across country until he meets with violence. “On the day he died Jack DeFazio stood and waited for a number to emerge from the dark recesses of the casino, a word to become flesh above a green table. Nothing.”
“Your Name is Evangeline,” written by blind author Cheynne Raine, brings us into the perspective of a blind girl as she tests the boundaries of the institution where she is held captive, and stages a daring escape. “They took your cane when you arrived because of its weapon potential and resigned you to a fate of trailing walls and clinging to the hands of others. They want you to be just another girl with her ghosts, but your name is Evangeline, and you can still think for yourself.”
As the characters in Addiego’s and Raine’s stories try desperately to escape their circumstances, so Thomas Benz’s darkly ironic characters in “The Rolling Divorces of Boundary Street” seek to escape their marriages. “Without kids and siblings scattered, they clung to familiar places and the provincial camaraderie, the few friends who had settled there. If the Griffins ran aground, who knew what dominoes would fall next?”
We live in a world that seems to be losing the values of love and compassion for which so many of these main characters yearn, and yet which some of them find.
Lee Hope, is the author of the novel Horsefever, a finalist in the Midwest Book Awards. She is a recipient of a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship, and a Maine Arts Commission Fellowship for Fiction. She has published stories in numerous literary journals such as Witness and The North American Review. She founded and directed a low-residency MFA program and has taught at various universities. She also teaches for Changing Lives Through Literature, which serves people on probation and parole.
