A little over a year ago, a group of us got together with the aim of producing a monthly magazine about books featuring established and emerging authors, and including author interviews, extracts, short stories, essays, diaries and features by our favourite writers about their latest work and themes or how they started out.

We quickly extended into visual stories, including excerpts from graphic novels, photography books and exhibitions that catch our eye, as well as film adaptations.

In our first anniversary issue, we investigate the borders between fact and fiction, and explore how narrative is used to make sense of history and to hold onto human emotion. Topics include the relationship between advertising and fiction, why mermaids are no longer seen in the world’s oceans, tender stories of heartbreaking cover-ups, grief and loss, and how to approach novels on themes of human failings, war and terror.

Please wish us a happy first birthday by sharing your favourites from the stories below with your friends.

“The disappearance of mermaids in our own time is ascribed to numerous causes. To the warming oceans, to pollution, to the overfishing of those species upon which mermaids subsisted, and to the accidental capture of mermaids by vast fishing fleets. The truth probably comprehends some combination of these factors, and thus the transit and eclipse of the mermaid becomes yet another figure for the devastation man has wrought upon his world.”

“The answers that history can provide depend on the questions we pose, and we put different questions and the answers are never fully clear. And of course there is the tendency because we are human beings to put it into neat narratives and to close it.”

“The really steady play of an otter, the time-filling play born of a sense of well-being and a full stomach, seems to me to be when the otter lies on its back and juggles with small objects between its paws.”

Extract and illustrations from the centenary edition of Ring of Bright Water.

Extracts from Emily Gould’s essay collection And the Heart Says Whatever, Ben Ambridge’s Psy-Q, Erwin Mortier’s While the Gods Were Sleeping and Mario Sabino’s The Day I Killed My Father; Karin Altenberg favours Breece D’J Pancake’s ‘Trilobites’; Bilal Tanweer untangles terror in Karachi; Sandra Newman invents a future dialect; Monique Roffey’s writers’ tips; Jo Walton’s preferred reading; the writing journeys of Sarah Perry and Jon Walter; at home with Patricia Ferguson, David Bezmozgis, Neil Bartlett and Greg Baxter; and a bonus micro-story by Andrés Neuman.

We welcome submissions to our New Voices strand from writers keen to rise to the surface with their stinging tales. Submit

And each month we alert you to new writing competitions as they are announced. Get writing, and good luck!

Competition deadlines

Brick Lane Short Story Competition
30 August 2014

Mslexia memoir competition
22 September 2014

American Literary Review Awards
1 October 2014

Boston Review’s Aura Estrada Short Story Competition
1 October 2014

Zoetrope All-Story Short Fiction Contest
1 October 2014