You don’t have to look too hard to find free fiction online these days, which is great, but it is slightly harder to find free contemporary fiction actually worth reading. So in the spirit of the holidays, here are 12 sources (because 12 seems to be the magic holiday number) for free, quality lit:

1. Featherproof Books‘ free mini-books are stories meant to be downloaded, printed out, and put together origami-style at home. Featherproof offers short stories as well as excerpts from larger works such as Blake Butler’s Scorch Atlas and Amelia Gray’s AM/PM.

2. BlazeVOX is a free online journal of innovative fiction and wide-ranging fields of contemporary poetry. They also offer a catalog of “weird little ebooks,” also available for free.

3. Jillian Ciaccia, a.k.a. thefictionist, offers four volumes of inventive and also slightly trippy short stories–entitled absurdities, peculiarities, Monstrosities, and Curiosities–as either a downloadable PDF or a paperback, signed by thefictionist and bound by hand. Both options are free of charge.

4. Small Beer Press (one of our old Free Book Friday sponsors) offers several of their titles for free download on their website. Available are such CC-licensed work as Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link, The Ant King and Other Stories by Benjamin Rosenbaum, and Mothers and Other Monsters by Maureen F. McHugh, all worth a read.

5. I know steampunk isn’t for everyone, but as far as genre fiction goes, Steampunk Magazine is really worth a read. The magazine, which is remarkably well put-together, features fiction, interviews, poetry, illustrations, and more. You can download the magazine for free on their website.

6. Because no list of free books would be complete without him on it: Cory Doctorow. The writer and Creative Commons advocate has made his stories and novels available for free download on his website.

7. remix my lit is more than just free fiction–it’s a free online short story anthology called Through the Clock’s Working that you can break apart and then revise, rewrite, or otherwise “remix.” You can also remix the remixes, which are available to read here.

8. Newly free DailyLit has hundreds of books, which are read in “installments” (sent by RSS or email), rather than all at once by download.

9. From 2003-2005 SSO Press, a nonprofit publishing company based out of Olympia, WA, launched a project called the “Olympia Free Poetry Movement,” which gave away poetry for free in an effort to inspire more people to create art. The movement apparently has ended, but the poetry zine–gorgeous collages of poetry, paintings, and photography–are still available online, and are absolutely worth a read.

10. IsReads, which we covered a few months ago, is a free biannual outdoor poetry journal. It’s published by a guerilla army of volunteers who plaster the poems all over lampposts, benches, etc in Baltimore, Nashville, and Pittsburgh. You don’t have to be a “publisher” to read the journal, but I’d wager it’s more fun that way.

11. One Story is a not-for-profit literary magazine consisting of just one story, sent to subscribers every three weeks. The magazine itself is not free ($21 for 18 issues, which is about as close as you can get to free), but they offer new subscribers the opportunity to read two free trial issues before paying the bill.

12. [Shameless plug] Did you hear about this really cool thing called Free Book Friday?

Feel free to add to the list!