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.

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Ernest Hemingway, Charles Dickens, William Faulkner, and other famous writers narrate the funny pages.

Some NaNoWriMo tips from Mark Sample: Use foreshadowing to hint what’s to come. E.g., have the vampire say “I want to suck your blood” before he sucks blood. And: Add tension by making the gender of your narrator indeterminate. This works for race too. And age. And number of nipples.

Another (more serious) NaNo tip: write slowly.

The Millions thinks the recent film adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are made a better trailer than it did a feature film.

Is Stephen King the most underrated novelist of our time?

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