When choosing this issue's theme, we kept coming back to the idea of truth. How can we know what to trust when the unpredictable becomes our constant, when so much seems so...unreliable? These recurring questions brought us to The Unreliable Narrator and its many guises. We wanted to explore the impact it has on the human narrative, but we also wanted to challenge the form.
The narrators here are rendered unreliable by their relationships, their grief, their art, their perceptions, their reckoning with their own identities—trials that make us human. But an unreliable narrator isn’t always a person. In this issue, it also takes the form of family history, public record, the criminal justice system—forces that define what we believe and how we see ourselves and the world around us. With this issue, we hope to test the boundaries of truth and examine the internal and external realities that impact it.
Endless thanks to our formidable contributors for finishing out 2020 with Fatal Flaw. We couldn’t be more invigorated by this issue, and we owe that all to your work.
