If I hear writers talking about literary magazines, I often hear them getting excited about some new magazine on the scene. They talk about the experimental aesthetic or the unique formatting or the promise of aggressive marketing. They talk about what they’ve submitted and what it might mean to get something accepted. They talk as though the magazine might just be the next Paris Review—or the next Beloit Fiction Journal, for that matter.

Beloit’s annual journal of fiction contains engaging stories with clear prose. Every literary magazine usually has at least one story in which I feel the author’s style detracts from the characters or narrative – one of my biggest pet peeves – but I couldn’t find that fault in any of these stories.

In Keith R. Denny’s short, remarkable dream-sequence of a story, “Ulrika,” the reader is swiftly trammeled up in the twisty mind of a would-be fiction writer for whom “the possibility of narrative is machine-gunned down in the street like a mad dog.” Lucky for us, the narrator’s self-effacing assertion does not hold true for “Ulrika” nor any of the other stories in the wonderfully narrative-packed Beloit Fiction Journal.