Fictitious Books fibs

Fictitious Books fibs is an experiment in writing fiction – fibs is an online portal where ten distinct voices speak about their lives, their hopes, their fears and their disappointments in their own unique way. The names of these ciphers are for the most part arbitrary. What matters is their effort to come to terms with their existence as best they can. Their ambition is to make sense of the world they live in by expressing themselves in a variety of forms of writing: blog posts, historical novels, short stories, flash fiction, drama, fantasy, and literary, historical and political essays.

Imaginary Fictitious Books Authors 

Authors at Fictitious Books fibs are not who they seem to be at first sight. Most of them prefer to remain elusive. They have created their own original cover stories to conceal their true personalities:

Zeb Solitanu no longer knows who he is. Since the new regime was installed in Globopolis, he’s been forced to accept an alternative identity that he rejects. Between bouts of exhilaration and suicidal depression, he writes Solitanu’s Blog for Fictitious Books. He’s looking all the time to break free and make contact with the inhabitants of Outer Neblus. Check out Solitanu’s Blog at ZSol.

Odette Chesnay remains a mystery even to herself. Half French, half English, she can’t make up her mind where she belongs or which language suits her best. Her short stories echo her rootlessness and uncertain cultural identity.

Lucy Engellis is an aspiring actress. She likes the idea of pretending to be someone radically different. From time to time she writes plays for Fictitious Books about imaginary people in impossible situations.

George Ithaka is an unrepentant revolutionary with one eye on publishing his writings at Fictitious Books. His imagination is fired by hopes of far-reaching social change. Until the revolution arrives, he is committed to writing novels in suburbia and fraternising with dissident groups in Paris and Athens.

Scarlett Moonstone likes to remain an enigma. To add mystery and complexity to her persona, she reshaped her identity as a fibs short storyteller. The imaginary tales that she writes for Fictitious Books focus on ordinary people whose lives are transformed by extraordinary events.

Naomi Quicke is an incurable romantic. Her character constantly shifts gear between excitement and disillusionment. She was commissioned by Fictitious Books to write short stories that reflect her quixotic emotional instability.

Sienna Roxlade is convinced that she was a notorious celebrity in a previous life. A fervent belief in her own future reincarnation as an acclaimed writer compensates for the anonymity of her present existence. She produces short stories for Fictitious Books about her imagined multiple lives.

Michael Scriven is an author who used to write books on Jean-Paul Sartre and Paul Nizan. More recently he made the decision to opt for the imaginary and reinvent himself as a storyteller.

Marec Slivenich is fascinated by the seemingly endless possibilities of the internet. As a fibs author, he prefers the alternative existence of cyberspace to the dispiriting world of everyday life. His writings for Fictitious Books are a curious mixture of reality and the hyperreal.

Isobel Vellacott was disappointed when she grew up. She much prefers the enchantment of childhood. Her written contributions to Fictitious Books reflect her desire to escape from the reality of an adult world and see life instead as a fantasy.

Explore the writings of these ten imaginary Fictitious authors in search of an identity: Zeb Solitanu, Odette Chesnay, Lucy Engellis, George Ithaka, Scarlett Moonstone, Naomi Quicke, Sienna Roxlade, Michael Scriven, Marec Slivenich and Isobel Vellacott.

Fictitious Books Publications

Explore the following fictitious books tales available in the fibs creative online library:

Triangles by Lucy Engellis

Drama in a penthouse suite in London – following the death of highly successful entrepreneur and businessman, Oliver Maynard-Oakshotte, only one of three people can, in accordance with the terms of his will, inherit a four billion pound fortune. Who will it be? His son, Francis Maynard-Oakshotte, or one of the two principal women in his life, Ingrid Lindstrom and Stella Bowers? They have three hours to decide who it is to be be. For the decision to be valid, all three of them must be in complete agreement. If they cannot decide by the stroke of midnight, none of them will receive a penny and the entire estate will be bequeathed to Oliver Maynard-Oakshotte’s favourite London art gallery. The deliberately adversarial nature of the terms of the deceased entrepreneur’s final will and testament pits the three characters against one another in a bitter triangular personal confrontation – Triangles: Power, Money and Choice – A Fictitious Play in two Acts

Downward Spirals by George Ithaka

Daniel Harte, a social science student at the LSE, had from an early age been fascinated by tales of revolutionary violence. So he didn’t have a moment’s hesitation in accepting the invitation of his best friend André Rivette, to join him in Paris in May1968 to witness at first hand the nascent student uprising. What happened in Paris, however, proved to be more complicated and disturbing than the revolutionary scenarios that he’d studied in books.

Magical Miranda by Scarlett Moonstone

In a series of fourteen short stories about ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances, Scarlett Moonstone explores the dilemmas of everyday living in the contemporary world: Magical Miranda, Aquatic Sky, Splash, Eurostar Kiss, Lightning Drop, Alternative World, Oscar’s Lament, Six Days, The Camden Strangler, Valentine, After the Flood, Wildcat, Millennium Yesterdays, Forgetting Zoe.

Counterfeit by Michael Scriven

Paul Chandler had thought that being a newspaper reporter would make his life more interesting. And it did. But not in the way he’d expected. Unwittingly involved in a murder and an international counterfeiting operation, he and his best friend Joe, a freelance photographer, soon realise that their lives are in imminent danger as they are drawn relentlessly into an escalating criminal conspiracy that coincides with the outbreak of the Second World War. Counterfeit is a novel of love, friendship, deception, loss, survival and deliverance that begins on a tranquil beach in Sussex in August 1939 and ends amidst the destruction and carnage of the beaches of Dunkirk in May1940.

Monsters of Narratokia by Isobel Vellacott

Calypso had always been disappointed with her life in Swiss Cottage. Her discovery of the Narratok DreamBook transforms everything. In a dream about the French revolution, she meets a bionic cat called Atomic and her real father, King Benevol of Narratokia. From that moment on, she is plunged into a rollercoaster adventure divided between epic battles with the terrifying monsters of Narratokia and difficult conversations with her friends in Swiss Cottage who think that she is going mad. Join Calypso on her journeys to Narratokia as she attempts to rescue King Benevol from imprisonment and restore him to his throne. Witness at first hand her struggles to defeat the fire-breathing Rhinotaur, the monstruous Tentaculopod, the awe-inspiring Croculosaurus, the demonic watchdog Rottsnarler, and Blackheart himself, Terrox the Terrible, who rules Narratokia with an iron fist from the temple of the God Cyclon.

Monster Drawings by Jill

Short Fibs by Michael Scriven

Brevity lies at the heart of Short Fibs. As both contributor and editor of this concise fictional book, Michael Scriven offers an assortment of microfiction, flash fiction and short short stories written by ten fibs authors: Daylight Robbery, Mobile Escape, The Sicilian Alternative, Egg, Exploding Love, False Dialogue, Special Day, Plague, Jigsaw Julie, Punch Line Flash, Labels, Two-Faced, 13 Black, Watershed, Ludovic, Murder Mystery.

Anticlockwise Journal  by Zeb Solitanu

Extraterrestrial Illuminated Fiction

Dystopia defines the Anticlockwise Empire. Anticlockwise is a dystopia of fear and nightmares, a dystopia of surveillance and isolation, a dystopia of despair…Anticlockwise Journal offers a chilling portrait of life in Globopolis, the capital city of the Anticlockwise Empire. The journal was discovered in the secret files of the Globopolis police department. It records the daily life of a citizen called Zeb Solitanu who had been under surveillance by the authorities for several years. Citizen Solitanu was suspected of harbouring and disseminating subversive ideas through his scribblings in Solitanu’s Blog.

  Michael Scriven Writer and Researcher

Michael Scriven is a writer and researcher who has published widely in the field of contemporary French and European Studies. He was previously Professor and Academic Director of the European Business School London and Director of the Institute for Contemporary European Studies (iCES), Dean of the Faculty of Modern Languages and European Studies (CES) at the University of the West of England Bristol, and Head of the School of Modern Languages and International Studies at the University of Bath.

Michael Scriven’s field of research expertise is contemporary French and European cultural history, media studies and broadcasting. He was co-founder and President of the UK Sartre Society, and from 1995-2000 was Executive Editor of Sartre Studies International: an Interdisciplinary Journal of Existentialism and Contemporary Culture. He has contributed research papers to international conferences throughout Europe and North America. His work and publications were recognised by the French government when he was awarded the title `Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques’. He was a member of the European Studies panel for the 2001 UK Research Assessment Exercise.

Michael Scriven Publications

Michael Scriven is the author of Sartre’s Existential Biographies (Macmillan and St Martin’s,1984); Paul Nizan Communist Novelist (Macmillan and St Martin’s,1988); Sartre and the Media (Macmillan and St Martin’s,1993); Jean-Paul Sartre: Politics and Culture in Postwar France (Macmillan and St Martin’s,1999); and Jean-Paul Sartre: Politique et culture dans la France de l’après-guerre (La Chasse au Snark, 2001). He is also co-editor of the following books: European Socialist Realism (Berg,1991); War and Society in Twentieth Century France (Berg,1991); Television Broadcasting in Contemporary France and Britain (Berghahn,1999); and Group Identities on French and British Television (Berghahn, 2003). He has made significant contributions to many edited volumes on French culture, history and politics, and has published extensively in both French and British journals, most notably, Europe, French Cultural Studies, Modern and Contemporary France, Journal of European Studies, Media, Culture and Society, Franco-British Studies and Les Temps Modernes.

Michael Scriven Founder of Fictitious Books fibs

As founder of Fictitious Books fibs creative online fiction, Michael Scriven has re-invented himself as a fictional storyteller. At fibs he publishes fictitious tales under a variety of pen names, experimenting with contrasting narrative voices and different narrative forms.

He is the author of the following fictitious books: Counterfeit: All Roads Lead to Dunkirk – A Fictitious Novel (2017); Downward Spirals: Disruption in Paris 1968 – A Fictitious Novel; Magical Miranda: A Fictitious Collection of Short Stories (2017); Triangles: Power, Money and Choice – A Fictitious Play in Two Acts (2017); Monsters of Narratokia: Giants, Beasts, Reptiles, Serpents and Tyrants – A Fictitious Fairy Tale (2020); Anticlockwise Journal: Extraterrestrial IIluminated Fiction (2020); Short Fibs: A Fictitious Assortment of Microfiction. Flash Fiction and Short Short Stories (2020); and Solitanu’s Blog (2017-2026).