It’s the tail end of the year, and everybody’s got a list. Ours is community-sourced: the top ten recommended stories on Fictionaut since beta testing began in August, as determined by a combination of comments, views, and faves. Congrats to the writers, thanks to everybody for reading and commenting, and a happy, healthy, and productive 2009 all around!

1. The Hollow by Kathy Fish
2. Ambulance by Pia Ehrhardt
3. States of Residency by Myfanwy Collins
4. It’s a Boy! by Laurel Snyder
5. Baby Hater by Pia Ehrhardt
6. Perfect by Marcy Dermansky
7. The Daughters by Myfanwy Collins
8. Someone Emailed Me Last Night and Asked if I Would Write About Nachos by Sean Lovelace
9. DICKY DEW by barry graham
10. Salty by Meg Pokrass

(You can always find the most recommended stories of the last 7, 30, and 365 days here.)

“Dad woke us up and said it was time to go.” Thus begins “Christmas Morning” by Rarely Likable blogger and Northville Review editor Erin Fitzgerald, an eerie post-apocalyptic flash fiction that distills the promise and dread of the holidays into a compact 200-word story fraught with hope and fear. It’s our way of wishing you happy holidays and thanking you for being a part of Fictionaut. We’re thrilled with the way the community is developing, and we’re looking forward to adding all sorts exciting improvements to the site in the coming year.

If we were to assemble an anthology of Christmas stories on Fictionaut — alas, there are none that reference Kwanzaa or Chanukah — we’d also include Gary Percesepe‘s “Moratorium,” in which the narrator’s sister is wanted by the F.B.I. “in connection with car bombings in several states on Christmas, 1972. These bombings were of black Buicks wrapped in white Christmas paper, with embossed red crosses and ‘Henry Kissenger, War Criminal,’ written in blood on the hoods.”

In Jesse Jarnow‘s “Free Time,” Tom Mareema‘s “White,” and John Minichillo‘s “Death in Venice,” Christmas lights illuminate office parties, San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood, and a debauched, virus-infested cruise ship. Unreedemed gift certificates are among the clutter of a burgeoning relationship in Briggs Nisbet‘s “Last Thing,” and Marcy Dermansky‘s tween heroine prefers “Halloween” to Christmas.  Finally, in Matt Brigg‘s “Sugarexplosion,” “everyone knew Douglas peed his pants during the Christmas Pageant.” Merry, merry!

Shari Goldhagen, Claudia Smith, Molly Gaudry, and Amy Guth contributed essays to What Happened To Us These Last Couple Of Years, an anthology of writing inspired by the Bush years and edited by David Barringer.

When the Flock Changed, an excerpt of Maud Newton‘s novel-in-progress, is available at Narrative Backstage.

Meg Pokrass interviews Kim Chinquee over at Smokelong Quarterly.

The December issue of elimae features work from five Fictionauts: Brian Beatty (“Corduroy“), Kim Chinquee (“Five Fictions“),  Meg Pokrass (“Two Fictions“), Randall Brown (“Something Else“), and Jennifer Pieroni (“Three Fictions“).

Tara Cottrell received the runner up award in the Indiana Review short fiction contest for her story “Post.”

Lauren Cerand has been elected chair of the board of directors of Girls Write Now, a creative writing and mentoring organization for high school girls in New York — and she’s matching donations until December 20.

At Largehearted Boy, Keith Lee Morris presents a  Dart League King playlist that includes representative songs for each character.

“How They Were Found and Who They Were That Found Them,” a new story by Matt Bell, is up on Wigleaf.

As always, please drop us a line if you have news to share.

“Ben Greenman, an editor at the New Yorker, is a writer who is seriously weird. He is also seriously funny. Yet the best of the stories in this collection are more than funny.”  That’s the San Francisco Chronicle on A Circle is a Balloon and Compass Both: Stories About Human Love — but that was last year.

November 2008 saw the publication of Correspondences, a limited-edition, hand-crafted collection which spawned the Postcard Project, a collaborative experiment that invites readers to fill in gaps in the text.

Ben’s official site features samples of his essays, short fiction, and humor pieces. (Don’t miss the Sarah Palin musical.) He is also a contributor to the mp3 blog moistworks. Ben will be reading at Melville House Bookstore in Brooklyn on December 11.

If you weren’t a writer, how would you spend your time?

If I wasn’t writing, I’d listen to music, but no one pays you to do that. Or maybe I’d run one of those sleep studies where people come in and get fitted with electrodes and then fall asleep in a laboratory bed with laboratory cameras watching them as they doze off. There’s something nice about that: something alienating and erotic and rational and deeply irrational all at the same time. Or maybe I’d stream time backwards twenty years and end up playing defensive tackle in the Canadian Football League. I think I could do it. I’ve got the size, plus the will to tackle.

Which book do you wish you’d written?

There are three that spring to mind. Joseph Conrad’s Victory, Stanley Elkin’s Searches and Seizures, and Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb. There are pieces of everything in there, and if you scrambled them all up and redivided them, I think you’d have enough insight into human nature, verbal inventiveness, and hard information to last for quite a while. Plus, I’d love to have them on the “Also By Ben Greenman” page in future books.

Name one website you couldn’t live without.

I’d say coudal.com, the site for a Chicago design firm, both because they do great work and because they find so many other great diverting sites, and also the AllMusic Guide, because…well, the answer’s right there in the name. All Music. I keep giving multiple answers to single questions. Sorry.

What are you working on now?

I’m just finishing up a novel for next spring called Please Step Back. Melville House is publishing it; it’s the story of a funk musician who is vaguely like Sly Stone and tracks him from the late fifties until the mid seventies. I am also finishing a collection of short fiction, another novel, and a set of essays. We’ll see what actually gets done. Time will tell. Time is always telling everyone everything.

Whiskey or yoga?

Does anyone say yoga?

Pittsburgh’s own Caketrain publishes gorgeous books and a journal designed to “submerge you in a birthing tank for gelatinous language monsters.” Issue 06 features work by a record number of Fictionauts, including Sara Levine, Jayne Pupek, Michael Kimball, Forrest Roth, Brian Foley, Kate Hill Cantrill, and Kim Chinquee.

We asked Caketrain publisher Joseph Reed to pick a favorite piece on Fictionaut, and he chose Lizzie Skurnick‘s poem “You Could Marry Anyone.” Sez Joseph:

At Caketrain, we have adored Lizzie for years now, but her latest works are among her most incisive and attentive. The rarest of specimens, Lizzie not only acknowledges but engages an oft-forgotten poetic history of metric and sonic technique, all the while throwing her subjects into an unmistakably modern relief — exposing the heart, then dicing it into sharp and shapely slivers of verse.

As it happens, “You Could Marry Anyone” appears in the expanded edition of Lizzie’s Check-In, which Caketrain is releasing in 2009. Lizzie’s Shelf Discovery, a book of essays based on her acclaimed Fine Lines column at Jezebel, is coming out from HarperCollins in May.

Fictionaut Tayari Jones is one of the writers to win a 2008 United States Artist Fellowship, along with Jeff Chang, Joy Harjo, and Barry Hannah. Tayari’s first novel, Leaving Atlanta, is a coming-of-age story that centers on the Atlanta child murders of 1979–81 and won the 2003 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction.  Her second novel, The Untelling, traces the legacy of a fatal accident that haunts a family.

Tayari will be in Kampala, Uganda, to teach a writing workshop for woman’s writing group FEMRITE in January, and you can follow her blog. Here are Tayari’s answers to the Fictionaut Five.

If you weren’t a writer, how would you spend your time?

All my life, I’ve had a secret desire to be a hairdresser.

Which book do you wish you’d written?

Property by Valerie Martin.

Name one website you couldn’t live without.

Do social networking sites count? If so, twitter, twitter, twitter. Otherwise, Practicing Writing is my first stop in the morning. She knows where all the opportunities are and is kind enough to share.

What are you working on now?

A better question is what’s working on me, not the other way around. A new novel called The Silver Girl.

Whiskey or yoga?

Whiskey. And make it a double.

Mad to Live, Randall Brown‘s (very) short fiction collection, has won the Flume Press Fiction Prize. We can’t resist the temptation to quote this blurb by Terry Brown-Davidson in its entirety:

Randall Brown’s flash fiction collection, Mad to Live, exists at the intersection where quirkiness and originality blend into something entirely new:  a new voice in fiction that’s rapturous and funny and daring, with many layers of depth floating beneath the lyrical and crystalline surface.  This is work of certain genius, raw genius hammered and compressed into short short stories that move us like poetry, that make us long, like the oddball characters in Randall’s collection, to devour life with the gusto with which a pregnant woman crunches down bugs.  Raw, beautiful, ugly, supremely funny: Brown’s fiction lures us in then mesmerizes us with its incredible siren songs of loss.

Randall is the Lead Editor of the flash journal SmokeLong Quarterly, and his latest piece on Fictionaut is “And There He Is Saying His Prayers.” Mad to Live is available from Amazon and Flume.

“I’m in love with Pia Ehrhardt‘s ‘Baby Hater.’ I think it’s a perfect story because it fulfills the purpose of the best kind of fiction–it helps you to understand the drama of other people’s lives. On a personal level, ‘Baby Hater’ clarified a comment my mother made many years ago: she said she hadn’t slept well since the day I was born.”

Meakin Armstrong is the fiction editor of Guernica: A Magazine of Art & Politics. His story “Odds Are” is available on Fictionaut. Pia Ehrhardt was recently interviewed by Silent City.

A former science journalist living in Jerusalem, Tania Hershman has been named named the European regional winner of the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association’s short story competition. (You can listen to an audio version of the winning story at Tania’s site.) Her debut collection The White Road and Other Stories (Salt) has been praised for its “unique combination of narrative extravagance and human intimacy” by Melvin Jules Bukiet.

Tania also edits The Short Review, a website dedicated to reviewing short story collections, and her virtual book tour is currently underway.  Tania posted If, a new story written “in that magical flash writing space where all self-censorship vanishes,” on Fictionaut.

If you weren’t a writer, how would you spend your time?

Reading all the books I haven’t had time to read yet because I studied science at university and never got to just sit around and devour great literature. Read, watch films, read more, and get a lot of sleep.

Which book do you wish you’d written?

I don’t really wish I’d written anyone else’s book because I think we can only all write our own, but if you insist, I read a stunning book last summer, Open Me by Sunshine O’Donnell, and it was not only well written, it was an amazing story and the telling of it was so unique, so innovative, I really wish I’d written that.

Name one website you couldn’t live without.
Google.com

What are you working on now?
More short stories, more flash fiction, and a possible idea for a film script.

Whiskey or yoga?
My yoga teacher is Scottish so he would be outraged that it’s either/or. He brings single malt with him, for afterwards!

We’ve expanded the Fictionaut blog and added a few bells & whistles: you can now follow Fictionaut news via RSS feed, and you can leave comments. Also, the blog is now publicly visible — you don’t have to be logged in to see it, so tell all your friends to stop by!