A Complete Fiction

With little evidence, would-be author P.J. Larkin serves a "nibble" on the trendy new social-media app Crave, accusing editor George Dunn of stealing the novel she submitted to him for publication.

The nibble shoots to the top of the site's Popular Menu Items and before you can say "unpaid literary labor," George is embroiled in a scandal, his job and book deal in jeopardy. P.J.’s novel is snapped up amid the publicity, but has she revealed her sister Mia’s secrets in the book? Some diners on Crave think so, and now it’s P.J.’s turn to feel the public’s scorn.

Told in the humorous vein of Where'd You Go Bernadette?, A Complete Fiction examines the very serious questions of who has a right to tell a story, and has cancel culture gone too far in our social media-drenched world?

R.L. Maizes’s debut novel, Other People’s Pets, won the 2021 Colorado Book Award in Fiction and was a Library Journal Best Debut of Summer/Fall 2020. She is also the author of the short story collection, We Love Anderson Cooper. Her stories have aired on National Public Radio and can be found in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading and in The Best Small Fictions 2020. Maizes’s essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, O Magazine, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and have aired on NPR. She is a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Fellow and the recipient of a Fellowship Grant from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture for 2024-2025 for her novel-in-progress. Maizes was born in Queens, New York, and lives in Boulder County, Colorado, with her husband, Steve, and her muses: Arie, a cat who was dropped in the animal shelter’s night box like an overdue library book, and Rosie, a dog who spent her first year homeless in South Dakota and thinks Colorado is downright balmy.