Allison Stalberg is the author of Adelina and The Bug Parties, a novella about a fairy who falls in love with a luna moth.
In “Adelina and the Bug Parties,” Lu the luna moth and Adelina the faerie seamstress fall in love at a praying mantis wedding. They attend all kinds of bug parties, from termite birthdays to spider funerals. During and between the parties, Adelina learns how to cherish the most fleeting of moments as her low-stakes life meets the high stakes of the insect kingdom in this absurdist but poignant fairytale.
The story won OFIC magazine’s novella contest along with “Missing Ange,” by Erica Cheng. The novellas were published in a special Doubles Issue.
“These stories speak to each other in interesting ways, playing on themes of love and devotion, and how those feelings become distorted by the nature of time. For this issue, we took inspiration from a French bookbinding method called tête-bêche (head to tail) binding. Whichever way you hold it, you’ll be looking at the front of one of the novellas, upside down to the other and eventually meeting in the middle.” – OFIC’s publishing announcement
In “Missing Ange” by Erica Cheng, ambitious engineering student Wes is kidnapped and taken to the future by Lyra, a time traveler desperate to solve the mystery of her brother Ange’s disappearance, having supposedly died in a lab accident related to the invention of time travel. A mystery unfolds, with Ange at the center of everything.
About OFIC: OFIC Magazine is a quarterly publication with a simple goal: to promote the original work of fanauthors whose aesthetics and interests may not align with the genres of traditional publishing, but whose work still aspires to literary aims—work that may be dark or grotesque, unabashedly joyful, or just too filthy for the general population. We publish work that can’t fit anywhere else.