My dictionary of British slang tells me that “Sloane” was the first name of an insufferable female archetype of the upper class in the 1980s. When I saw that the protagonist of Audrey Szasz’s novel Teleplasm (Amphetamine Sulphate, 2025) was named Sloane Epstein it suggested great wealth and privilege crossed with echoes of the human trafficking, pedophilia, and white collar underworld of Jeffrey Epstein. Indeed, the novel exists in a narrative Petri dish of high-class travel, Internet media celebrity, psychological deterioration and pervasive sexual violence. Sloan Epstein is a young woman attached to a roving paranormal researcher Dr. Novák, her “boyfriend,” for whom she serves as a fraudulent medium on his globe-trotting YouTube investigations into hauntings and apparitions. “Teleplasm,” on the book’s first page, is given as the title of a substance that hypothetically emanates from “the body of a medium that serves as the means for telekinesis.” Since nobody, especially Sloane, credibly believes in the fiction of the afterlife they are perpetrating, we as readers of the novel are left to witness her body’s other more tangible excretions in the form of aroused sexual response to Novák’s frequent physical and psychological abuse. Sadomasochistic sexual encounters come along with the punishing regularity of a city bus schedule, and are described with microscopic detail. More narration, though, is given to Sloane’s interior emotional landscape which is as weirdly terrifying as the darkest and most deranged true crime documentary offered on the planet’s most off-the-chain YouTube channel on the eve of its being taken down for obscenity. In fact, this monologued material—morbid, funny, shocking, unrepentantly antisocial—makes up the bulk of Szasz’s novel:
My wish for affection is part of a larger neurotic trend, put in motion by an artificial hand or a silent motor—eternity is an unwound thread from an invisible spool—…and what am I doing right now? I am imitating a masochistic patient who longs to be trussed up in my cell like a worm in ever-tightening restraints, disobeying verbal and written commands, slacking off, twisting and turning, prophylaxis as state oppression, I need to please a white man, a clearly ironic overtone of hypergenocidal mania, sexual relations with my oppressors, analysts, teachers, furtive incest wishes, involuntary recall of trauma injuries, furious self-flagellation that never seems to satisfy…
Imagine a jet-setting version of A Clockwork Orange, without the Russian slang and with no Ludovico Technique, no rehabilitation or reprogramming narratives or moral vision, no orientation to conformity, and you may come close to imagining Teleplasm. The narrator’s voice (this is a common feature of all Szasz’s fiction that I’ve read) is overpowering: sophisticated and urbane while at the same time uniquely dissolute and down for whatever, including felonious criminal behavior and flouting all forms of authority. This makes for a fascinating window onto her characters. The boundaries broken are both external and internal. Szasz’s narrators dare you to develop something as frail and weak as a moral objection, or a set of stupid moral reactions, to their litanies of outrage and danger.I had opened myself up to Teleplasm maximally, so the book stood for something significant, to me. I could play along with the morbid curiosity. When I read it, though, I felt like “There, I’ve read enough of the evil.” A good book in many ways, an evil book in a big way, in the biggest way. Teleplasm should not be banned as a matter of policy, but if you’re looking for books that from an enlightened and amused perspective “might as well be banned,” banned by a smirking individual, not a humorless, illiterate group, banned for one’s self, this is something like that book. It is a turn-off for all further books of its type about that kind of moral degeneracy. And there are a lot of books of the type out there, but none as well-written as Teleplasm, I’d wager. In it, I have found the book that has done the turning off for me. Szasz’s cool, black book has pride of place in my library.When I first read it, I gave it a five-star Goodreads review, deservedly, but on a personal evaluative basis, as a reader, it’s something I didn’t know if I ever wanted to read again. But I did read the book, again, later, months later, to taste and savor the moral viewpoints upon reflection. Part of this faculty of judgment was arrived at by reading several of Szasz’s novels and novellas, and feeling like I had seen enough of the progression of subject matter to get the picture and not needing to go further. I’m not 100% sure there’s much more depth to the cistern than what I saw from Counterillumination, Invisibility: A Manifesto, “A-Z of Robomasochism,” and finally Teleplasm. Szasz has written numerous other books that if one had extra cash and a desire to read further (itself a species of masochism, arguably), one could buy those books and explore it all. It feels like a case of clever craftsmanship and enfant terrible wit utilized on subject matter with diminishing returns.This repulsion is “satisfying” in a way, a sad satisfaction for a reader. Sad that it was necessary. But happy too, in that I can move on to investigating other moral territories in literature. It drove me, in a sense, out of Dennis Cooper’s best-of lists at year’s end and into the arms of …some more positive sensibility. I don’t know the Marquis de Sade enough to place him, but you thank Sade, you thank him for drawing the boundary. I no longer believe for me “there is no boundary.” Szasz, and in one sense, Sade as one of her influences as a writer of S&M erotica and venom spat into the collective face of the squares, illustrated that, not for themselves or for their thirsty, depraved readers, but for me. And I’m just one reader and nobody to heed. I might as well, however, find a philosophy or a utility in Teleplasm. It provides a service, an aesthetic object lesson: an example of morality and aesthetics meeting perfectly in a novel. If it’s a Sadean thing, I wouldn’t say it draws me closer to reading the French aristocrat. Notoriety is only so compelling — beyond a certain point it has no power over “good people,” people with some orientation, as Joris-Karl Huysmans found after writing his own horrid books, towards the Cross. I hate to sound like a Midwestern mom at a school board invoking Satanic Panic. I don’t think that’s me. I don’t know if I need to read more Audrey Szasz in a quest to gain the forbidden knowledge. And I don’t think this was ever her goal as a writer. The thing about quitting reading her for the kicks is that there is always the world’s horror reportage of its own evil you can turn to. Artists can give you so much of the picture and are in the end, interchangeable with each other. Szasz’s writing was a unique piece of the puzzle; her books, if they were living things, would have zero remorse, zero pangs of conscience about their capabilities. If there was a satirical vein in Teleplasm meant to invite a more complex moral reading, it was too Baroque for me to detect. Maybe I was too much of an obtuse normie to read, in the comedy of Sloane Epstein’s monologues, some cry for help, something about the need for love? It is a damaging, upsetting watershed of a book. I don’t think I’m interested in that kind of damage anymore. I could have gone on reading other transgressive and nihilistic authors forever, presumably. Again, I’m grateful to Teleplasm’s author for helping me to shut off the nozzle.The Marquis de Sade, it seems to me, served as a “necessary outlier” to position other philosophical, moral, and literary coordinates around, against which normalized values can and must be established. And yet the world seems by some lights (whether subjective or objective, whether localized perceptions or mediated global consciousness) to be well on the way to becoming more Sadean every day, not so much of an outlier anymore. Maybe here’s another value of Teleplasm. It’s a dishonest, ill-equipped critic who hasn’t read Sade yet invokes him, but I don’t really need to read him to get this: I have Audrey Szasz’s updated writing.
writer Nastya Valentine with books reviewed by Jack SkelleyNastya Valentine – Cyberhorny: Navigating a Sexual Dystopia, and The Cyberhorny Dream Diaries: In Defense of e-Subjectivity (cyber-horny.com)Earlier this year, a writer friend said to me, “You and Nastya should talk. Her new book is kind-of Myth Lab-adjacent.” This was in reference to my novel (subtitled Theories of Plastic Love, Far West press). Sure enough, both Cyberhorny and its Jungian appendix The Cyberhorny Dream Diaries orbit with my art obsessions in “the clitoverse” – the eroto-celestial plane where forces of pleasure defeat the denial of desire and warping of libido amid or despite algorithmically administered market controls. Cyberhorny and Myth Lab (which also share a purple/pink palette) overlap with influences high and low, esoteric and sticky, Lacanian and Lynchian. On one level, Cyberhorny is an online sex primer. You’ll learn a shit-ton about Only Fans. But watch it extrapolate through space and time. Scoff if you must, but Cyberhorny compares to the encyclopedic scope of Moby Dick or Urn Burial by Sir Thomas Browne – that free-range, 17th century compendium of paradoxical thought. Valentine exceeds limits of logic to glory in eromantic flights of consciousness.Erin Robinson, XXX MachinaNot a book but an ongoing art/research project by Erin Robinson . XXX Machina disentangles then reknots the naughty algorithmic dimensions of porn and digital bodies. It matches up with fave theorists in this zone (Bataille, Baudrillard, Lacan, Deleuze) plus of course the seminal cyborg feminism of Donna Haraway (also Myth Lab-adjacent). Robinson and XXX Machina have upcoming exhibitions in Denmark and Northern Ireland. Philippa Snow, Snow Business (Isolarii, 2025), and It’s Terrible the Thing I Have to do to Be Me(Virago, 2025)Philippa Snow is our top, post-everything, pop-culture appraiser with super-empath powers, lovely hair and two new books. I discovered Snow’s writing in an essay about my dear friend Bob Flanagan. Although Bob, who died in 1996, is legendary for his severe SM performances, Snow discerned in Bob the hilarious poet I knew. Bam! I was hooked on Snow’s insights into icons. (The Flanagan piece appears in her 2022 collection, Which As You Know Means Violence.)This year the author released two volumes from UK presses: Snow Business and It's Terrible The Things I Have To Do To Be Me: On Femininity and Fame (I plan to nick her idea of long-ass titles for my next novel!). Snow’s empathy animates something we all experience but few articulate: We’re stuck in a love/hate relationship with mass media. In Snow Business, her bemusement meter even evolves into mini-fictions, inhabiting the psyches of stars in all their tawdry grandeur. This summer I interviewed Snow for Interview magazine: She in London, me in L.A.Lotte Latham, Maternal Potential(Carrion Press, 2025)Latham, like Snow, is based in London. Linguistically gifted, Latham caught attention with her 2023 memoir (Dear Mr. Andrews, Guts Publishing Ltd.) It charted the ins-and-outs of sugar dating across the hotels of Europe: the joys and the sads. In Maternal Potential, narrative gives way to wordplay bursts that verge on verse with this theme: losing a pregnancy… and the resulting disharmonious hormonal emotions. Plus, it links astute class awareness with dirty talk: “He counts to ten, spanking me for all the rent I didn’t pay. Then fucks my face quite roughly and I vomit red wine up. I took a photo of the red sick on the sheets – a menstrual stain.” The touching/funny tone makes you fall in love with Latham’s voice. Maternal Potential delivers mourning (sickness), wisdom and tart humor. It ponders motherhood in a world where love is commodified yet persists. Chris Kraus, The Four Spent the DayTogether (Scribner, 2025)Speaking of loving dick, Chris Kraus has a new one. The Four Spent the DayTogether takes a stab at true-crime. The murder doesn’t come until the book’s final third, but it shoots new juice into Kraus’ customary veiled memoir. Catt (a stand-in for Chris) consumes evidence surrounding a teen meth death in rural Minnesota where she has a home. The details are chilling. They would also be inexplicable except for Kraus’ deft – almost invisible – picture of the economic realities at play: These teens have no financial future. The wheels of capitalism also grind silently through the book’s other two sections: reflections on young Catt’s Connecticut roots and radicalization; and on the period when Kraus was a victim of canceling. Supporting the book, Bel Ami gallery in Los Angeles created “Civil Commitment.” This is a vast collage of investigative material compiled by Kraus. I’ve seen it. It’s like one of those conspiracy theory memes, with interlocking photos and documents. Author/artist Juliana Halpert compellingly cross-references the Kraus research with photographs of Halpert’s mother’s work as a public defender. It’s another lens for uncomfortable conflicts rendered in the book.Danielle Chelosky, Female Loneliness Epidemic (Far West, 2025)Speaking of Chris Kraus, Danielle Chelosky entered my world with a request to forward her early chapbook to Kraus… who enjoyed it. Me too. Since then, Chelosky’s books have buffed-up into (Mary) Gaitskillian or (Lynn) Tillmanian tales of wayward fucking/romance. She even titled her recent series of NYC readings Weird Fucks, after Tillman’s early collection (which I devoured at the time I was writing Fear of Kathy Acker). The charm of Female Loneliness Epidemic is not in the stories per se, but the details and tone of angsty pleasure and compulsion. One line I circled: “He thought it was silly I liked to keep my underwear on during sex, pushed to the side. I didn’t want him to think it was silly. I wanted it to be sexy.” This tracks with a bolded, pleasure-dom line that climaxes the first paragraph of Fear of Kathy Acker: “Just leave your underwear on!” While Chelosky hits rich veins, she cultivates a personal iconography of White Claws, schoolgirl skirts and fishnets. L Scully, Self-Romancing (Dopamine Books, 2025)Step 1: Read Self-Romancing. Step 2: follow L Scully’s Insta for their near-daily sonnets. Step 3: Get inspired to make your own. Writing can be a self-cringing, existential quest: “Is this any good? Will anyone read it? I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” But L is fearless, banging out declamatory affirmations drenched in emotion and quotidian mini-dramas: “The love I fell in yesterday will carry me through a lonely evening.” Or “You didn’t say the sex addiction thing was either hot or even a red flag and that made me feel like a person.” To clarify: Self-Romancing is not sonnets, but page-length paragraphs. Still, many of the lines would transplant well to sonnets. Maybe I’ll steal the ones I quoted.Jerome Sala, Glop (BlazeVOX, 2025)It still mystifies me: Poetry, whose job is to train the weapons of language upon itself, often neglects pop culture. I mean, this is the air we breathe: movies, music, memes, news, sex, celebs, algorithms. And all of these – let’s face it: even our own personalities – are tools of advertising. That’s why the gods of commerce created the droll Jerome Sala: America’s premier pop poet. It took this Madison Avenue copywriter (now retired) to rebrand verse via the love/hate bonds of commodification. To see profundity in stupidity:
Which is why I stand before you nowproof of boththe glories of capitalismand the truthof dialectical materialism
Get Glop today!Amy Gerstler, Is This My Final Form? (Penguin Poets, 2025)Amy Gerstler is America’s greatest living lyric poet. There, I said it. A perfect example is this book’s “Night Herons,” which appeared also in The New Yorker and represents Gerstler’s specialty: the dramatic (comic) monolog. So, no surprise this volume also veers into dramatic works. (“Siren Island.”) I’ve seen her miraculous/weird plays rendered on stage. They’re a corollary pleasure on the page. Rosie Stockton, Fuel (Nightboat, 2025)There are (they say) two parts of a metaphor: The “tenor” (meaning) and the “vehicle” (the image that carries it). The verse of Fuel drives the vehicle of desire – literal and symbolic, internal and societal. In a Lit Hub essay Stockton compresses the book’s rich power poetics: “According to Lacan’s update to Freudian psychoanalysis, all drives operate at the speed of the death drive. The death drive is a mistaken longing for pre-Oedipal harmony that fuels the coherence of our symbolic order, mediating between life and death. But as every Orphic driver knows, this has more to do with our quest to cohere meaning in our symbolic worlds than biological instincts. For better or for worse, the drive is a series of detours that lets us speed toward and circle around the enjoyments of life that we, in a world that is literally running out of gas, don’t have the energy for. Not literally death, but the deadness we intercept driving close to the guardrails. The drive circuits around what keeps us alive, beyond mere self-preservation. The proof is in the poetry: the death drive, actually, is on the side of life.”Olivia Kan-Sperling, Little Pink Book: A Bad Bad Novel (Archway Editions, 2025)What is it? A meditation on a color. A bilingual fable. A confection of cuteness. A yummy gummy romance. A takedown of Asian girl-pop machinations. Little Pink Book is also something impossible: an exaltation of the power of “sentimental” melodies/lyrics. (Have you ever had a sappy song trigger a deep cry?) Pretty word-worlds cuddle you weirdly: “Having been injected into this bubble-gum bubble, Limei felt cold, slow, sticky. This usually sweet and nice shade – the color of girls and fun – felt, suddenly, claustrophobic. Pink was also the color of insides, and this was too much, too much inside.” Amid the mash of forms is narrative, complete with horny/porny parts. Is it all in little Limei’s mind? Kan-Sperling is a virtuosa of multiple styles.Cum PunkA gorgeously gooey online anthology, Cum Punk proclaims: “Cum is in-your-face life energy. We are here to blow loads and do big juicy squirts in the faces of sex neurosis, prudish pretension, and desire-dementing repression. Gone are the days of self-leaving, disembodied cums. Now is the time of fully embodied, self-arriving cums! We bust through fear and shame as hard as we bust our finest, most violent nuts.” Ashley D. Escobar, GLIB (Changes Press)The NY School of Poetry is in good hands... and mouths. Validating generational elasticity, Escobar’s Glib references Frank O'Hara, but instead of “i do this, i do that” it’s “i fuck this, i snort that.” Laffs and schemes and senses and dreams, and sexuationships, thick with references... totally IN THE MOMENT. Poetry is not ABOUT something; it IS that thing. “Thingness,” as Eileen Myles posits in the intro. Plus, any book that rags on Sally Rooney & includes lines like, “your dick is my favorite toy” gets extra points.
Chris Kelso is a Scottish writer of dark, weird fiction. I came to his work through Voidheads (Schism), and he’s since published Metampsychosis with Feral Dove, and most recently, a monograph on the film Possession with PS Publishing’s Midnight Movie Monographs.Possession, as it happens, is a long-time mutual obsession of ours, so when I freaked out in Chris’ Instagram comments about this monograph he very kindly sent me a copy. So I decided to interview him about it. He’s a great sport. Didn’t even get annoyed at my stupidly long ‘questions’, which are at times more monologuing than questions, honestly.ALICE: I think you said your research into Possession was a natural consequence of feeling reflected in the film, is that right? What was the impetus to write a monograph specifically?CHRIS: Yes, I think that’s often what happens. Writing is a response to overarousal. I have an emotional response to something and then I untangle it by writing it down. I can’t approach much in a purely intellectual way, and I’m certainly not an expert on, well, anything really, but I do know grief, insecurity, and grave self-loathing. I suppose addressing those intrinsic traits both motivated me and qualified me for the job of writing a monograph. And Possession is such a unique film, one which most people have an intense reaction to. So, I’m not special. I don’t think I have a particularly groundbreaking take on the film from an analytical perspective—that said, I didn’t really have much of a say in the matter. The reaction was authentic and part of my processing was to write this thesis. Żuławski’s Possession was merely a lens filter to modify the light before it hit the sensor.ALICE: “Writing is a response to overarousal” seems like one of those big truths I’m going to chew on for a long time. Because you’re right! Art in general is a response to overarousal. Yes, there’s the drudgery of it, and yes, you need a skill set to execute anything, but art seems like, at an essential level, where we put everything which overflows. Like a drip tray. What effluence you get depends on what’s overflowing: emotions or thought or images or whatever is too much.CHRIS: I agree. And I do feel really self-aware that these (intensely personal) artistic projects I've been involved with lately are serving that exact purpose: to contain that industrial run-off, but also to prevent further infection or contamination. The imagination should be drained like a cyst, because left untapped it’ll bleed out of your pores and make you do questionable things. This process is also good if you use emotional memory as a funnel. Lots of spill-prevention imagery here.ALICE: You might be able to tell I don’t like romanticising this process, at least not in public. I also think the best work comes from filth. (Well-tidied, precisely-described filth, but still.) Which is why I adore this film. Filth, as I’ve always thought of it, seems to be a similar idea to Julia Kristeva’s abjection. You mention Kristeva, and I’ve only recently started to parse Powers of Horror thanks to our mutual friend Elle Nash. How did you come across Kristeva’s work?CHRIS: Like you, I first came to Kristeva through Powers of Horror, but back in my university days. I was also looking for meticulous filth and all its acolytes. I find her to be a really fascinating thinker (most French feminists are), but also someone who is empowering as a female voice. Interestingly, she has a novel called ‘Possessions’.ALICE: I wanted to ask you about your feeling of possession over the film itself: you say it feels like it was meant for you somehow, that you dreamed about it before you’d ever seen it. I felt so much kinship with you there: I have dreamed about things, and the dreams carried the weight of meaning, even though I couldn’t understand that meaning at the time, and then I’ve later found out that not only did the dream have specific meaning, it was a clear and precise reference to something extant in the world, and so reflective of it that the dream seemed almost like precognition. I grew up in a very—how do I put this—post-Enlightenment household, and have been a soft sceptic all my life, and the process of developing true doubt is recent and unsettling, because belief itself was abject in my upbringing. How did this feeling of precognition change your experience of the world? Has Possession become something of a sacred object for you?CHRIS: That’s really interesting. I’d describe myself in similar terms, although in truth I tend not to think too deeply about it. The only thing I know for certain is that I know absolutely fuck all. I remain sceptical; like you I’m loosely aware of the roiling unpredictable energy of the universe. All I know is how I felt at that time, and how I chose to express that probably doesn’t do the phenomenon justice—because these things should not be defined by the limiting parameters of language. That said, I’ve gone along with it all. I’ve never tried to rationalise something so formative and emotional. Possession is totemic for so many people. It could just be the transcendent quality the film has, but to me the film is important in a way that’s difficult to define. ALICE: It feels right for you to be another Mark doppelgänger. I feel like there are uncomfortable lines connecting me to Anna like cobwebs. I wonder if the film taps into something universal when it comes to our shadow selves and dark sided emotions, and turns most of us into Anna and Mark doppelgängers. Do you think Żuławski intended that, or did he intend to say something about his own toxic relationship and tapped into common fears and insecurities while he was doing it? Reading your monograph, I thought there might be arguments for both: he seems to disregard the internal lives of other people (his actors in particular) in pursuit of his art, but the film does deal with several socially-relevant emotions like the toxic relationship between East and West Berlin, spying as a metaphor for observing our significant other, etc.CHRIS: Absolutely. I think it’s reasonable to assume Mark and Anna express an archetype of domestic insecurity and psychological fragility. I’m not sure about Żuławski. He was a very complex artist, a genius by most accounts, yet I’m still not sure he was consciously aware of his own intent. Granted, he was going through a devastating break up at the time and Possession was certainly a communication of his pain. Whether or not he had it all worked out, I’m not so sure. As you know, there is a latent or instinctive force at play when producing any kind of art. We’re subtly coerced towards certain themes and often that attraction will have something to do with where we’re at in our personal lives. Then again, he was a genius, so maybe he was consciously working through these themes with a kind of ordered methodology—planning dialogue that was pertinent and rich with subtext, forming deliberate metaphors, etc.ALICE: I rarely like high concepts which explore wordplay, but Possession is one of them. The film discusses possession in the demonic sense and possession as ownership, and what counts as possessing/being possessed. Your monograph mostly addresses possession as object. I've always been curious about why, given this, there are minimal references to Christianity in the film. In fact the only one I can think of is Anna's wordless discussion with a wooden Jesus mounted on a crucifix, immediately before her flashback miscarriage in the subway. I've always taken this as her rejection of religion: she says to Mark that she “miscarried faith.” In your monograph you discuss the miscarriage as a form of abjection: rejecting her married life with Mark, expunging it from her body, which would make it a form of self-interest, i.e. Kristeva's jouissance. Jesus fucking christ, this question is getting long (bear with me)... CHRIS: Long questions are always welcome! I’m so glad this book worked for you. It means a lot, because I was utterly terrified of what people would think.ALICE: I can only speak for myself, of course, but I appreciate anything which is carefully and deeply considered, especially if it gets me to think deeply in turn (especially especially when I’m allowed to pester the author with questions about it).Okay, so, first, do you think the ideas of Anna expunging her marriage and her religious beliefs can co-exist as interpretations? And secondly, if Anna's fucktopus is the larval form of the Mark doppelgänger, do you think it'd be fair to say that Anna is miscarrying her traditional marriage and the real Mark, in favour of the idealised, perfected version of Mark she needs?CHRIS: I think these two ideas can co-exist, absolutely. I was interested in finding an interpretation that would empower Anna, because I’m not entirely sure the director had that in mind when he was making the film. I think it’s likely Żuławski wanted Anna to simply be a bit of a mental she-devil who shagged a monster in an act of unbridled female promiscuity. I’m also not interested in Anna being a victim: she deserves better than that. I think you’re right, though. I think it's healthy and intelligent to project emboldening ideas to Anna’s character. I believe the miscarriage is a physical excretion of her old life to a man she never truly loved. In truth, the message and intention of the film is very muddy—and I suppose that’s why we love it!ALICE: This really speaks to the power of interpretation, because I find it impossible not to relate to Anna, and if the director really did intend her to just be an insane villain who fucked a monster, then my whole experience of the film is a simulacrum. But it’s a useful and beneficial one, right? Because otherwise I’d lose one of my favourite pieces of media. Anna being exclusively a she-devil in my head would make the film far less progressive to me, and therefore unwatchable. CHRIS: Me too. I think the audience has power here, though. We do have the ability to reclaim and reinterpret, to imbue and elevate. The film is more than just Żuławski; it’s also Adjani’s performance and the raw paranormal energy she brought to it. It’s the softer, more nuanced hand of Frederic Tuten. Art can take on many new faces the more people who look at it. I don’t think any of the truly ‘great’ pieces of art have one true interpretation anyway, despite what the creator intended. ALICE: This is why monographs like yours are so relevant and useful: they open new avenues of interpretation to an audience who might not otherwise connect with a piece of art. I don’t fully ascribe to “death of the author,” but maybe a soft version of it, like “the author should shut up and let us interpret their work on our own, thank you very much,” simply because these interpretations allow art to say more than it was probably intended to say. Of course we can and should consider the author’s interpretation of their own work, and the author’s situation and environment during its creation, but other interpretations have inherent value as useful simulacra. CHRIS: Hear hear! And I also think masterpieces can happen by accident sometimes, almost willed into existence by certain forces (the audience in particular would count as one of these extant contributing forces). Not to get all spiritual on you!ALICE: Why do you think Anna dies? Every time I watch this film I'm left with the impression that this was what she wanted: the two of them to die together. But I can't decide why I think that is.CHRIS: I’m going to give a bit of a cop-out answer to this one. Anna dies because she is the hero. And I believe all truly great things should end. Great TV shows should have a finale. Epic books should have a last page. Your favourite bands should disband. People should die. There is nothing more unnatural than ‘going on’. Our end is what gives our lives meaning in the snapshot of time we get to be here. If we kept going for hundreds of years we would become exhausted pain-camels made evil with boredom and apathy. Anna is the feminist hero we’ve needed for a while. She had to die to become a legend.ALICE: I don’t think that’s a cop-out at all! It’s an observation on the demands of narrative, and completely correct. I’m gonna pin you down with a different question, though: what do you think happens at the end of the film? I’ll tell you what I think happens: Mark’s incompetence at his spy job (i.e., not noticing that one of his bosses is in fact pink socks man), because of his divided attention due to the destruction of his marriage, has led to some international incident, and this results in the destruction of Berlin with an atom bomb. That’s what I see in the ending, like, this marriage was so fucking toxic it ended in nuclear war.CHRIS: Jesus Christ, that’s better than anything I could come up with. I think I’ll just glom on to your evaluation. ‘When you’re beat, you’re beat’, as they say. tips hatALICE: I'm talking a lot about Anna because your monograph was uncomfortable, which I think you intended, and one of the reasons it was uncomfortable for me is that it's an inevitably male point of view. I'm aligned with Anna, so a lot of your personal observations and interpretations of Possession are those which would have never occurred to me. It feels like we're standing on opposite sides of a sculpture and can't really imagine the sculpture from the other side. Which is kinda, you know, the point. And what it must have been like in Berlin at the time. Until reading your monograph. I never even thought Mark could be a pathetic character, an impotent one, or powerless—but of course he is. Your version of Mark was so convincing to me, I'm rethinking some of my past relationships. But still, Mark, for me, is the aggressor: I assume Anna's behaviour is in response to aggression Mark has no knowledge he's committing, or limited consciousness of, because Anna's behaviour has a desperate escapism about it which I recognise in myself, in my own desperation to escape, despite still loving my partner. There's a liminal emotional state where all you can think about is your toxic partner, and you don't want to end the relationship, but you want to pull away however you can, and you end up in completely nonsensical behavioural patterns as a means of escape without escape (Anna emptying cabinets, putting clothes in the fridge, preparing a cut of raw meat for nobody). CHRIS: I agree that Mark is the aggressor. He is also pathetic. Most aggressive, controlling, and insecure men are pathetic. That’s how they convince themselves and other people that they’re victims, and probably how they justify awful behaviour. Their patheticness is weaponised. Something I shamefully know about all too well.ALICE: In contrast to how your Mark tries everything to possess Anna and fails, I see Anna trying everything to satisfy Mark except the things she absolutely cannot do, or risk complete loss of her Self. She says, desperately, that she's failing him, she's a slut, she's a monster—she admits to all his accusations. She is willing to accept his accusation that she is not a socially palatable woman. You struggle with Mark's desire to control in your monograph, and you admit to feeling the same desire to contain and control a woman from your past. I noticed something, and I wonder if you know this: the monograph itself seemed (to me) to be a species of control. You want to get ahead of our opinions of you; you want to reassure us that you're okay now, you're cognisant of what you did—but you want us to feel a certain way about you, and even attempt to regulate our emotions through chapter-specific song suggestions. What's it like to grapple with this tendency to want to control? I deeply empathise with it: I experience a lot of obsessive thinking. Does thinking about Possession help you control the difficulty of controlling your desire for control? I don't have control over this question anymore. I think I'm asking: how are you now? Did you write this with the idea of reaching out to other people struggling with the issue of control?CHRIS: Yes, that’s a very astute observation. First, it’s interesting you mention Mark committing these small atrocities without even being aware of what he’s doing. I find that’s a common vice among young men, including me way back when. I think men can be so driven by lust that it genuinely clouds empathy. That’s not an excuse, but I think it rings true in most cases. I look back at my own failings as a human being and I can’t undo any of it. I am desperate to talk about it, though, and to improve myself. If I need to overcorrect laterally then that’s what I’ll have to do. That’s kind of what I’m doing with this book. It’s an acknowledgment of past transgressions and an untangling of a knotty ego. Control is a big problem for people who are profoundly insecure. At the best of times it feels like life is always slipping away from you, ultimately because of what you lack. You cannot control because you don’t deserve control. That’s your punishment. Yet you keep trying to insidiously impose your dominion over other vessels-of-consciousness, and if you’re a man you can feel entitled to those vessels. When these vessels-of-consciousness demonstrate agency you’re left reeling in a whole new spiralling vortex of uncontrollability. When you grow and realise you cannot control much of your own life, and nothing of other people, you go about seeking to impose it in more positive ways – like being an obsessive ‘fixer’ or giving too much of yourself to too many people. Or becoming a public authority figure like a teacher in my case. If this book connects with anyone then I’ll feel good about it, but the main impetus was really a selfish self-therapy. Maybe the book is voyeuristic in that sense. I think when my wife went through her pregnancy I realised my relationship to control had to change in a big way. The terror of watching my wife give birth. The terror of watching my newborn become a toddler. The terror of a new love that engulfs you in its fist, deeper and more agonising than any love you have ever experienced before or thought possible. You cannot live a life of control under those circumstances, so you need to recalibrate. I think I have a better grasp of it all now. I’m doing well – thank you for asking! I think I need to be ‘checked in’ with every now and again, lol. ALICE: Your research, speaking of, is impeccable. I especially enjoyed the final dialogue between Jörg Buttgereit and Graham Rae. What was it like, transcribing that? Getting to know two artists of that calibre?CHRIS: I owe that interview to Graham who is a close friend of Jörg. Jörg is obviously a wonderful director and it was a privilege to have him involved, reaffirming my belief that literature and discussion is the closest we get to true magic. ALICE: Ah, right! So let’s scrap that question, and ask another: have you had any interesting conversations about the film as a result of researching this monograph, which you didn’t write about (for whatever reason, like narrative flow or length)?Also, I couldn’t agree more: I feed on theory. I’m one of those annoying participants of a destination workshop who never wants to talk about anything but theory, haha.CHRIS: I actually have fairly regular interesting conversations about this film with my friend Rachel, who might love Possession more than we do. She would’ve written a much more interesting monograph, in truth, but all our conjecture and theories have wound up in the book. There is something about this film which brings people together in a weird, very specific way. I’m looking forward to chatting with you in person about Possession - and I’ll bring Rachel with me!ALICE: Looking forward to it!
Introduction for Logan for his Reading from 'Doom Is the House Without a Door' at Comfort Station on Saturday, August 16, 2025–Kathleen RooneyBook launch playlist: DOOM UNLEASHEDLogan Berry’s latest book gets its title from the Emily Dickinson poem “Doom is the House without the Door—” whose first stanza says:
Doom is the House without the Door—‘Tis entered from the Sun—And then the Ladder's thrown away,Because Escape—is done—
Logan Berry’s literary house also has no door, but not in the sense that one is trapped inside by walls lacking egress. Rather, nothing blocks this house’s threshold because the builder wants us to walk in and snoop.
Logan Berry’s literary house is an M.C. Escher-style mansion with infinite rooms stocked with impossible objects, warped perspectives, twisted geometries, and funhouse reflections.His literary house is a Piranesi drawing come to life, rife with endless staircases, akin to that artist’s Imaginary Prisons, full of subterranean vaults and extreme machines and round towers and men being stretched on the rack and grand piazzas lit with smoldering fires and connected with drawbridges and gothic arches, hung with rusty chains and scented with fetid wells and decorated with monsters in bas-relief.Logan Berry’s literary house is in every sense of the word a capriccio; in English a caprice—an architectural fantasy that puts new buildings and archaeological ruins and other artifacts and detritus in fantastical combinations that gratify the artist and intrigue the viewer with their dreamlike juxtapositions and liberty of imagination. One etymology for capriccio is that it derives from the Italian for the unpredictable movements and behaviors characteristic of a juvenile goat, suggesting that the work should be as freakish and mercurial as the artist can make it.Logan Berry’s literary house is a structure only partly built, but currently without end, an edifice that will keep growing until he either stops (perish that thought) or dies (perish that too, but everyone perishes).The oldest email exchange between myself and Logan that I could find is from January of 2014. He was a student in my intro to Creative Writing class at DePaul. Everyone had to write an elegy and Logan’s, addressed to his sister and called, “I Will Die Lex,” was so promising that I asked his permission to share it with the class and I’ve been a fan ever since. It ended:
Death staked His claimLike Columbus and his flag España.Fingers trace the entry,Sting sings.
Hand thrown aside.My body, a stepping-stone in the slush.Soot Sunset.
That was the open door I walked through to commence my tour of Logan Berry’s literary house. I feel lucky that I’ve got Transmissions to Artaud (Selffuck, 2020), Run-off Sugar Crystal Lake (11:11 Press, 2021), Casket Flare (Inside the Castle, 2023), Ultratheatre: Volume 1 (11:11 Press, 2024) and now Doom.About this room of the building, I have written: “A visual and verbal fantasia of money, meat, and misery, Logan Berry’s Doom Is the House Without a Door dances to the demonic, infernal rhythms of the 21st century. To look into this book’s gargoyle face is to risk allowing it to reap your soul. Its phantasmagoria of fucked-up fatherhood makes voyeuristic perverts of us all.” Logan Berry’s literary house is perpetually under construction, a kind of Winchester Mystery House, never-ending and mystifying: why did the creator do this? His literary house is above all a memory palace of things he cannot forget. Once we visit, we cannot forget them either.“Nature is a haunted house—but Art—a house that tries to be haunted.” Emily Dickinson wrote that in a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson in 1876.Logan Berry’s literary house is haunted. Long may he haunt.
With The Surrender of Man (Inside the Castle, 2025), Naomi Falk examines twenty works of art, using each as both touchstone and springboard for scrutiny of modernity. An exhibition of the psychic space inhabited by the intersection of time, memory and art itself, the book unravels as a stream of commingling impulses. Falk’s often febrile interrogations display a hunger to get to grips with the interior world as it probes contemporary existence. At times raw, inspirited, raging, and contemplative, the volume acts as a catalyst for the author’s questioning nature, and stridently asks what the hell is art for anyway? I spoke to Naomi about the book.Rebecca Gransden: What led you to The Surrender of Man for the title?Naomi Falk: The title had been in place before the book was anywhere near being finished. My attraction to it is a little complicated. There’s an obvious element of gendered language that goes hand-in-hand with the biblical proportions of the phrase, and it felt interesting to me to have a title of the book that was pretty deeply conflicted with the text itself. The sentence within which the title is housed is a significant turning point in the text, at least for me. RG: When reading the book it’s immediately clear that a great deal of care has gone into visual presentation. Was this a collaborative process with the publisher, known for their attention to the aesthetic experience of a book, or did you make strong stylistic choices from the book’s early inception?NF: John Trefry designed the cover and then Mike Corrao designed the interiors, and I am woefully indebted to them both for giving such a gorgeous body to the text. John and I already had such a strong overlapping aesthetic impulse, which was part of the reason I was so intent on working with him. He designed the emblem of my name at the bottom left of the book, which speaks to our mutual love for metal…. We actually did an hour-long set for Montez Radio together a few months back.RG: Objects possess transformative potential when you look closely, fastened by their makers—both human and otherwise—and cracked into the world.When considering the book’s formation, how much thought was given to its status as an object, an artwork, in its own right?NF: I am extremely invested in the book as object; I’ve worked in art book publishing for years; I’m an editor but also a designer and producer and publisher. Of course I’m going to care about those things; this isn’t an assembly line. Hundreds and hundreds of years of bookmaking history behind us. So much to draw from; so much at our fingertips. A text deserves a beautiful vessel! And a book doesn’t have to be expensive to make. I’m not going to waste my time making something that looks and feels like shit, even if I’m fine with buying things that look and feel like shit. RG: You’ll see how arbitrarily I’ve come across most of these works of art.An obvious question concerns how each work of art is chosen for inclusion in the book. You cover this aspect at length and I was struck by how the contemplation you offer becomes part of the book’s quality as a whole. When you reflect on the selection process, what stands out to you now?[caption id="attachment_17852" align="alignright" width="338"] photo credit: Andy Zalkin[/caption]NF: A lot of the younger artists in the book are folks I met through the passages of my daily life (which is outlined in the text). The lasting creative ramifications that someone’s work can have on you become most pronounced once you’re no longer in continuous contact with the artist: people move, new lifestyles emerge, we grow away from each other and become variants of ourselves that might not be compatible with the people we once knew. But the essence of their art and their ideas linger and entwine with your own work. Those hazy tethers come up again and again. Friendly spirits.It was also important to me that this not be a book of my favorite artworks. We have lived through such an intensity of listicles and “favorite things” in the past fifteen years, I worry we confuse the artist with the artwork they love…RG: They are taking over.The above quote is referring to words, words taking over, and suggests a multitude of interpretations. The book’s language at once contains the potential for manifestation, a means to precision, but also intrusion and alienation, an occupying force. For The Surrender of Man, was a clear stylistic approach embarked upon from the start, or did this evolve over time?NF: My writing evolved a lot over the course of writing the book, which took quite a lot of time because of the research that went into it (and because of the necessity for me to continue experiencing art to finish it). I kept feeling a pull to abstract the writing more and more, to imbue it with less uninterrupted academicish-leaning research and more language. The art in the book IS the lifeblood of the text, so the feeling of the language really needed to reflect a relationship between me and the art, and not just my projections… It actually caused some problems for me on an artistic level, and I made several revisions to the entire manuscript, which probably made the book messier than it ought to be…RG: How does the idea of confession arise in the book? Do you view The Surrender of Man as belonging to the tradition of the confessional?NF: To the extent that I implicate myself in the book, yes I would say it could be shelved within a tradition of confessional writing. I certainly don’t have plans to do it again!RG: What parts do dreams play in the book? You recount a recurring dream, and many times your responses to art are infused with the rich, uncanny symbolism associated with dreams. How conscious were you of the unconscious when writing The Surrender of Man?NF: I was possibly even over-concerned with the unconscious when writing the book. My dreams, and the dreams of others, are the wellspring of my writing practice. Increasingly, increasingly, it feels as if life is just the dream’s interlude. RG: No other generation of writer had been inundated with disembodied—but verifiably real—other people and their thoughts and feelings during the writing process in this way. Felt special, cursed, fresh.I think it safe to say that we are at a point in history where a lone mind has never before been exposed to such a number of psyches outside of its own. When it came to the writing of the book, is this something you moderated, or, alternatively, encouraged?NF: To use a phrase received from said outside psyches, there is a fair amount of “whataboutism” that I experience as I write. A tendency to want to make things more and more universal or interpretable to the point where what I am writing becomes only thinly tethered to its original meaning. It’s a real problem, and I’m working on it.RG: The idea of transformation recurs throughout the book, approached from differing angles. When you set out on The Surrender of Man, did you know what you wanted from it? Has that perspective shifted since its completion and publication?NF: On a broad level, the yearning and satiation of creating and publishing your work is so bright and abstract; it’s really hard to put into words. At one point in past years it all felt quite far away…I am happy I had the chance to experiment with the format, and that everyone involved with bringing the book into the world was supportive of that. As I mentioned earlier, the opportunity for the text itself to go through a series of new iterations, because of the freedoms I was afforded by Inside the Castle, supported every other intention of the work. RG: The format of the book seems a natural one for you, and is potentially endlessly mineable. Would you consider a further book of a similar kind, or do you feel you’ve explored the format for as far as it can go?NF: I aim to keep working within the nonlinear, and mostly nonnarrative. Although my current project DOES have a “story,” the “story” could be condensed into a few sentences. So many other people are writing good “stories.” I’m not a good storyteller, so I can leave it to other people to bedazzle readers with twists and turns and enticing character development, for now.RG: What don’t you want the book to be?NF: A definitive guide to interpreting art.RG: You mention an early attraction to transgression and horror, particularly horror movies. Are there films you would consider as complimentary to The Surrender of Man? Any recommendations?NF: I’m not sure if any films—excluding, perhaps, film essays—are complimentary to the work, or at least I haven’t found them yet. This text is very much in the service of other mediums. But if we’re talking about spooky movies…I suppose that my impulse for theatrics and drama comes from the obvious blueprints: The Hands of Orlac, any number of Poe adaptations, the Universal Monsters. I am obsessed with giallo films, the Saw franchise, Herschell Gordon Lewis, anything with a fantastical edge, the original and remake of Candyman, Hard to Be a God, Woman in the Dunes, and everything that Anna Biller has ever done. Is this turning into a listicle? Importantly, my friends Chris Molnar and Amy Griffis and I just saw the New York premier of the new Quay Brothers movie, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. That one is on my required viewing list. No one does it like they do. RG: Are there notable works you almost included but left out of the book? Or works you’ve encountered since the writing of The Surrender of Man that you wish could have featured?NF: I mean, kind of yes, but I need to fight that impulse. The purpose of the book seems to be the happenstance nature of so many of the inclusions, and if I tried to think of the scope of art outside of the specific years during which it was written, I would be doing a disservice to my own project.RG: The messiness of my mind has only become more pronounced as years and their memories accumulate. My ability to thread a cohesive narrative or to focus on a singular topic can’t parallel so many other writers I admire and I’m sure you can tell by the writing here that I don’t really want to find harmony and cohesion anyway.To what degree is The Surrender of Man a response to internet culture?NF: I think that most of my work is steeped in my lifelong participation in internet culture. I love the Web; I still feel excited about it every day. It raised me, in many ways. Video games have been instrumental in my writing style. The sense of awe I felt watching my dad play Myst when I was a girl has never left me. The strange collapse of distance between me and friends and strangers in the early years of AIM. Roleplaying in the Neopets forums. Being on MySpace trains… I don’t think The Surrender of Man is a response to the internet insofar as it has a sense of fragmentation or perhaps a lack of “focus.” I am looking for connection (within myself and with others) through my work in the same way that my internet personalities are signals or offerings…RG: The book is released by Inside the Castle. What attracted you to work with them, and how have you found that process? NF: Chris had brought Inside the Castle to my attention years ago. I couldn’t believe I wasn’t already familiar with them at the time, because as mentioned previously, I have an existing foundation for appreciating the kinds of texts ITC publishes. Work that offers an unusual amount of experimentation, work that might even be unconcerned with being understood. It’s been the best experience; no notes; a true dream.RG: I’m screaming into the bathtub because it brings me clarity.What has The Surrender of Man brought to you? NF: Solace, quiet, a sense of heightened wonder in regards to others and the work they create.RG: Where next?NF: The closure of this portal opens a new one, so now I’m working on a book-length piece of fiction.
Paint Your Wagon, the 1969 Western musical starring Jean Seberg, Clint Eastwood, and Lee Marvin, was a historic commercial flop, by turns both mindbogglingly strange, and mind-numbingly dull in its depiction of an anonymous, gold rush era mining camp cycling through the increasingly corruptive stages of insular capitalism. While its atonally sing-songy, borderline nihilistic theme reprises (many, many times over, burrowing into your brain and simply refusing to resolve), we watch as some 400 men invest their lucky-struck earnings into six agreeably trafficked women until their No Name tent City grows into a hedonist boomtown—a collection of 20-some-odd saloons that never sleep, and through which the men’s money can change hot hands in closed-loop perpetuity. Why am I telling you all this, you ask? Well look no further than my 2021 review of Brandi Homan’s Burn Fortune, the first title I ever read from femcel/horror-centric small press darling CLASH Books.Burn Fortune is a small wonder; an exercise in concision that nonetheless contains worlds. Written in tight, punchy bursts of poetic wit and poignantly relatable teen angst, it reads like the highly curated diary of a precocious young woman in a hell of a spot. Through the sharp, tilt-shift lens of the smalltown 1990’s midwest—a place which author Brandi Homan renders painfully (and at times hilariously) authentic via deadpan descriptions of flag corps politics, beer runs to the Kum & Go, and hot summers spent detasseling corn—we get to know June, a girl with the kind of nebulous big dreams that only small-town teenagers know how to have; that sense that there has to be more of something, anything, somewhere out there, and that you’re surely destined for all of it if you could only figure out where to go. It’s not until the local librarian introduces her to the films of Jean Seberg (an Iowa native who escaped to France to become the iconic star of such films as Breathless and Saint Joan) that June begins to think more deeply about what she wants, and how to get it.The sections in which she watches Seberg’s films could almost pass for Live Tweeting sessions, and her by-turns entranced and exasperated commentary injects her increasingly desperate circumstances (abusive boyfriend, sexual assault, unwanted pregnancy) with a brilliant levity that will make you want to watch right along with her (I for one will be checking out Paint Your Wagon ASAP). And while the thing this book maybe does best is depict the ways in which even the smartest people can find themselves hemmed in on all sides by seemingly inescapable circumstance—by a town, or a house, or a family, or even a single destructive person—what June finds in Jean (and specifically in her portrayal of Joan of Arc) is the will to break free of it all. To defy fate, raise high her battle flag, and fly like the prairie wind, because small towns hold on the tightest—to young women most of all—and absolutely no one gets out without a fight.I wrote that short review nearly four years ago, in what now feels like a much simpler time, but upon revisiting Burn Fortune’s blighted, broken heartland for this piece, I found that it hit differently under our present banner of red, white, and blue. For all her determination, the thought of June actually breaking free of all that’s tying her to the stake of smalltown, USA feels like a deeply optimistic reading—an astronomical possibility on par with Seberg’s own selection by Otto Preminger out of 18,000 hopeful young actresses vying to play his Joan (a rescue which, by all accounts, still left her beholden to the whims of a tyrannical male authority). The East is sinking. The West is burning. The government is a kleptocracy, and the economy feels increasingly like a game of three-card monte. Maybe June had a chance back in the DIY riot grrrl ’90s, but the futility of the future we now know waits for her comes through in countless devilish details, from her boyfriend’s hours spent duct-taped to an exercycle, to a perfect, microcosmic chapter in which she and her friends cruise “The Loop” on a routine Saturday night, jockeying for position as they mindlessly circle the main drag of their go-nowhere town. “That’s what being a good American is, right?” June muses on their endless, aimless plight. “Be better! Be better all the time!”Homan’s ending is open to interpretation, and I was certainly feeling better about America in 2021 than I am today, so far be it for me to claim any certainty as to what June can or can’t hope to accomplish. But by the time she sequesters herself in an underground culvert to light candles and recite spells—pictures of Seberg taped to the walls—it’s fair to wonder if she’s built herself a chrysalis, or a tomb. It’ll take more than a still-legal-back-then abortion or a fresh start in the next town over to truly outrun her devastating lot. No matter where you go within the invisible borders of the American patriarchy, there you fucking are. Even Jean took her talents to Europe (and even that only helped for so long). “Around here the only way to speak is to leave and if you leave you burn.”For those looking to truly opt out, allow me to pivot to Kristin Garth’s Daddy(from the ever-pugnacious envelope pushers at Anxiety Press), a physically discomfiting collection liable to make any man who’s browsed PornHub in the last twenty years squirm in his boxer briefs. Wielding the second person voice like a VR empathy trainer, Garth slathers her readers in a child pageant’s-worth of Lolital signifiers—bows and hearts, glitter and gloss, plaid skirts and pigtails—corseting us inside the minds and behind the eyes of female bodies we are almost exclusively accustomed to ogling at a safe and powerful remove. Whether building exquisite, tangled poetry from the inner monologue of a babyfaced sex worker bought and stabled for her ability to cry on command (“The Cry Shot”), or avenging the trauma of twin rollerskating ingenues turned sister-act strippers (“Twinkles”), Daddy cannonballs into the fetishization of girlhood with the no-fucks flagrancy of a trenchcoated pervert crashing the ballpit at a Chuck-E-Cheese, outragedly demanding a deeper examination of the semiotics of smut; of what so many get away with when the lights are lowest, and why.Nowhere is this truer than in Plaything—the novella that makes up the book’s second half—which centers around Melinda, a nominally enslaved young woman who is kept in a state as close to that of a living sex doll as one man can arrange for her. Cloistered in the kind of princess bed, fast fashion, Hello Kitty-print prison one might associate with a “barely legal” OnlyFans feed, Melinda is monitored 24/7, and dresses, speaks, and behaves according to the exacting specifications of her misogynist malefactor, existing in a kind of infantilized stasis for his pleasure alone. It’s a chilling scenario to see spelled out, and the degree to which it mirrors so much familiar content on the X-rated webrenders bold, lascivious text any remaining subtext regarding the 21st century porn-poisoned male brain—the desire for both absolute physical control over, and absolute emotional detachment from, the female body.Elsewhere, “The Plan” chronicles a daughter’s lifelong pursuit of physical beauty and runway fame in hopes of someday crossing paths with her deadbeat movie star dad, an unwitting, uncaring lothario who proves all too eager to fail her spectacularly anew. “Con Man” recounts in excruciating detail a Rubicon moment in which an aspiring screenwriter must decide exactly how much of herself she’s willing to give up for a shot at the bigtime, and reckon with the instantaneous, irreversible damage she’ll endure no matter which sliding door she chooses. And taking these casual violations into the spiritual realm, the title story unfolds through a series of e-mails sent by a rape victim from her LDS college to her devout Mormon father back in Florida (where most of the book’s stories take place), an evolution of increasingly unhinged reports which reveal her betrayal and exploitation at the hands of men at every turn. All of these stories take square aim at the impossible power dynamics baked into our socio-sexual bedrock—the master’s tools that will absolutely never dismantle the master’s house—and the thoughtless entitlement with which men at every rung of authority and success can and will view women as their rightful spoils, offering a leg up only if they get to cop a feel along the way.I’ve read Daddy twice now, and I don’t believe there’s a good man to be found anywhere among these cum- and tear-stained pages. Indeed, that Plaything’s Melinda ultimately escapes into a lesbian relationship seems to suggest the possibility that, as far as Garth is concerned, there may well be none left to be found. While we’ve undoubtedly made strides under 3rd wave feminism with the subversive reclamation of stripping and the rise of ethical porn, Daddy raises real and fair questions about the academic nature of this kind of empowerment, and the ways in which it can bounce back to bite real sex workers just trying to survive inside institutional sexism’s echo chamber. For so many of these women, the fact remains, men don’t really care why they sell their bodies, so long as they do it. We can always make it work to our advantage. This may sound like polemic, but I’m not even claiming to be above it. It’s a banal, pushbutton temptation the internet hucks at me every day. As Chuck Klosterman famously noted over a decade ago, “the biggest problem in my life is that my work machine is also my pornography delivery machine.”With all that said, Daddy feels like a true blow against the empire. What Garth has done here, brazenly and without compromise, is overload the whole damn system. Her ruthless commingling of adult and underage imagery, taboo and perversity, wanting to look and knowing you should look away, cumulates to effect a kind of autoerotic short-circuitry; a flaccid self-loathing. Her authorial voice is the literary equivalent of your girlfriend finding your browser history and screaming at you—“So this is what you like, you sick fuck?!”—until you die of shame. Even the book’s title and teenybop trapper-keeper cover art were enough to make me feel uncomfortable reading it in public. The fact is, none of this is new. Men have spent the past century building an objectification ecosystem that learns, commodifies, and enables our worst behaviors, and until we take responsibility for dismantling it (a prospect that looks less promising today than it has at any point in my lifetime) it will remain too big to fail. Considering everything that’s working against her, it’s a testament to Garth’s writing that she can still find ways to make us blush.As for those still looking to work within all that the patriarchy hath wrought, I’m not sure any writer has nailed the experience with as much honest, and self-aware precision as Danielle Chelosky, whose diaristic Pregaming Grief (my long-overdue first read from small press bellwether Short Flight/Long Drive) details her coming to terms, at the tender cusp of her twenties, with her own conflicted masochism. Torn between two older men—her manipulatively needy, hopelessly immature, yo-yoing heroin-addict first love (direct-addressed as “You” throughout), and an obdurately withholding, overtly condescending, all-too-familiar brand of “telling it like it is” aspiring comedian (Andrew)—Chelosky offers herself up as the sacrificial embodiment of Carson McCullers’s timeless relational paradigm—that of the lover and the beloved—and makes a strong case for the nature of human desire as little more than a pendular dialectic between the two. It’s strange to write about these presumably very real guys in such judgmental terms, but Chelosky is nothing if not cleareyed about exactly who and what they are, and her own complicated feelings for both of them. After centuries of men reducing all women to mothers and whores, she matter-of-factly flips that dichotomy on its head, making plain as day its unavoidable cognate: that all men must then be children or johns.Whilst ping-ponging back and forth between these two lunkheads, Chelosky forges a fledgling career in music journalism, tests the limits of her alcoholism, and does a lot of driving around with her bestie Quinn, at first trekking to well-known vistas like Joshua Tree and Death Valley (both places already being ravaged by climate change), and once the pandemic descends transitioning to shuttered prisons, defunct amusement parks, and even the faithless remnant of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s Heritage USA. The more of these long-distance interstate sojourns she takes, the more she starts to feel like a video game avatar butting up against the invisible boundaries of its world map, looking for some elsewhere that simply isn’t there. Though she has all the freedom she could want—all the practical freedom that June and Melinda long for—she still finds herself always and inevitably returning to the places and people from whence she came.“I felt suffocated by a nameless grief” she notes at one point. “This inexplicable feeling of ending,” and through her trespassing journeys into abandonment and decay, coupled with her dystopian descriptions of New York under Covid lockdown, and her dedicated attachment to outdated media formats, her tone begins to convey a palpable sense of lived-in doom—of an already-gone world that she somehow both misses, and never really knew. It’s in many ways the same grief we see in the black parade of album anniversaries (a trend for which, somewhat amusingly, Chelosky’s chief publisher Stereogum is directly responsible) and celebrity deaths that daily clog our interconnected plexus of screens—the collective, performative mourning of the past that feels communally engineered to continue into the future in perpetuity, like some hellish Oscars In Memoriam eternally regurgitating the nostalgia of how much cooler and realer everything used to be. But when everything becomes nostalgia, then soon enough all of life starts to feel like cosplay—a dissociating from our present reality for fear that there’s nothing left to achieve, or even hope for—that anything worth doing has all already been done.The same could be said for the numerous men she meets around the margins of her two bigtime loves—a string of largely interchangeable music industry bros and app swipes that only serve to reinforce her disinterest in her own generation’s algorithmic romantic compromise. ExPat Press honcho Manuel Marrero observed in his own phenomenal review of this book that “people used to like things in a way they don’t anymore” and in addition to the physical books and albums Chelosky so clearly treasures, those “things” very much include “each other.” While her peers often present as a shallow cavalcade of responsible(ish) drinkers curating themselves through detached, disposable hookups, she repeatedly, and belligerently disingratiates herself from their ranks, determined to chase a more permanent, transcendent attachment through the self-abnegation of submissive, rough sex and the consumptive void of blackout, like some questing, flagellant Mystic. “I writhed in never-ending hysterical fits” she laments, twisting at the ends of all her fraying ropes, “wishing to escape my body, this city, the whole world.”Something the book explores as well as any narrative work I know on the subject, is the necessary tradeoff between trust and danger within a mutual S&M arrangement. Chelosky is generous and fearless when it comes to sharing the details of hers and Andrew’s sex life—a thrilling, and occasionally frightening affair that hews much closer to the reckless violence of Año Bisiestothan the contractual fantasies of something like 50 Shades. Her acceptance of risk—her need for it, even—is part of what makes it work for her. “I regretted everything I did the minute I did it, I deserved a punishment for it, for just existing. I wanted to get perpetually drunk so I could be liberated from this prison of insecurity, no longer having to be aware of or responsible for myself and my inevitable mistakes” confesses one passage in this relentlessly quotable book (I must have copied down at least 50 while making notes for this article, often snapping pictures of whole pages for reference). “I felt ashamed of the videos I watched when I was alone. The degradation I desired felt so antithetical to the feminist beliefs I held” admits another. Where Daddy adamantly refuses to allow for this kind of counterintuitive ecstasy, Chelosky’s journey of abject self-discovery argues for a different kind of personal and ideological freedom. Andrew exhibits, pretty inarguably, an unapologetic chauvinism (I’ll never forget the anecdote in which he mansplains why her choice of favorite Beatles song is wrong), but he also proves capable of tenderness and affection and, most importantly, seems to get what it is she needs from him, even if he’s not always willing to give it. Regardless of all she ostensibly knows and feels to the contrary, for her “A place of pain [is] just another name for a home.”There is so much resignation here, for an author so young—so much hard-won truth and understanding of the limits of human relationships, and the very real possibility that to fully love anyone is to spend your whole life overcorrecting for how you first loved, or failed to love someone else. I’ve barely touched on “You” so far, but his presence in, and influence upon her worldview is pervasive, bordering on omnipresent. For anyone who’s ever held onto someone too hard, for too long—or conversely, had someone refuse to let them go—Pregaming Grief will carry a visceral weight. The neurotic ghosts of memory and regret. The constant replaying and reimagining and repenting of all that might have been. “I’d learned the hard way that getting older only made things worse” begins my favorite line in the book. “I was an expert at waiting out my problems until they ruined my life.” If you know, you know, and Danielle Chelosky knows.Indeed, for as much as I wanted to examine Pregaming Grief within the same feminist framework as the two books above, it ultimately forced me to expand my thinking. For as much as I kneejerk loathed Andrew and “You” and felt depressed by the tired, ubiquitous tropes of modern manhood they represent, I was also regularly mortified by moments of recognition in them both—in Andrew’s pop culture didacticism and dogged resistance to vulnerability, and in “You”’s willful naivete and cowardly, druggy self-sabotage. And for as much as I wanted better for Chelosky (whatever judgy, paternalistic vision for her that might entail—yet another blindspot writing this piece made me confront), even more relatable were her own patterns of rejection and subsumption—of the contradictory desires to be someone’s “nothing” and their “everything at the same time”—the lover, and the beloved. I can sit here wanting these guys to do better, but Chelosky herself might well contend that they’re both already doing their best (frustrating as it might be). In the end it’s clearly far more than just these two privileged, flawed men, or even the patriarchy under which they were forged, that’s hemming her in. It’s the pain of existence itself.So where do we go from here? What do we do with all this baggage piling up between us, and around us, and upon us—saturating our brains and our neural net of feeds—filling our country up to its glass ceiling, sandbagging its invisible walls, and spilling over its eroding edges from sea to shining sea? If Paint Your Wagon is any indicator, we may be out of good options; decamping from this No Name City and these rigged systemic structures may simply not be in those three Monte cards. For plucky Jean Seberg, after two hours of subpar musical numbers and chemistry-free love triangulations, the gold dries up, and the entire settlement literally sinks into the Earth—destabilized by an elaborate system of tunnels the male protagonists have dug in order to rob their fellow workers blind (how’s that for metacommentary?) Her cabin still stands, and Clint Eastwood sticks dutifully by, but as the rest of the prospectors pull up stakes and the principles bid their farewells, the film leaves an existential taste in the mouth—the nagging suspicion that, stay or go, there’s really nothing else to do but the same things they just did all over again—the master’s tools just waiting to rebuild in the next town over, and the next, and the next.So yes, it’s hard to feel as hopeful for June as I did four years ago. And yes, the U.S. is feeling more every day like a place we may need to escape (though Europe today is hardly the expat safe haven it once was). As she herself puts it, heartbreakingly, near the end of Burn Fortune, “It isn’t that I don’t want this it’s that what I want is something else and that is not this”—as shifty and vaguely tautological a summation as you’re likely to find of our National sexual politics in 2025. If she wriggles her way off the pyre, it’ll be a miracle deserving of Sainthood. I’d like to think she could find a friend like Melinda, someone to help her break free of men’s possessive, binary bindings. Or else one like Chelosky with whom she could roam the dying countryside, blasting cassettes and CD’s and chasing her own tortured version of peace; standing in the flames and “learn[ing] independence because [she] had no other choice.”
Sienna Liu’s Specimen (Split/Lip Press, 2025) seeks to articulate the ineffable facets of desire. A fragmentary and lyrical hindsight finds lovers in an entanglement as fragile as it is seemingly unwise. Not only an interrogation of memoir, of the compulsion to write other people onto the page, but a probing commentary on the price and rewards of setting out on such a task. When we look back, what do we ask of those who reach out in memory? I spoke to the author about this plaintive and dissecting book.Rebecca Gransden: When did you set out upon writing Specimen? What length of time had elapsed between when the events of the book took place and putting them down on the page?Sienna Liu: I started writing Specimen in February 2023, about ten years after the events in the book took place.RG: I met someone at a party; something about him reminded me of E. I hadn’t thought about E. for a very long time. Too long, so that when I saw this faint replica, it felt as if a complete stranger had caught up with me on a street and started to tell me a secret about myself. We see echoes of others in people. Were there echoes that brought about your decision to write the book? What made you decide to write about this time and these events?SL: Exactly! It happened just like I described—I was at a party one day in February 2023, and met someone there who reminded me of E., a lot. I do tend to find echoes of others in people, but up till then I had not really encountered a true doppelgänger of E., who I had for the longest time thought to be one of a kind. I’ve also thought about writing about E. so many times but was never able to start. But finally meeting someone who was that reminiscent of E. felt like a writing prompt: now, go write. I left that party and started writing the first vignette as soon as I got home.RG: How did you decide upon the title for the book?SL: I can’t remember the precise moment, but at some point I realized I used / would use the word specimen in the book a few times, in different contexts with different meanings (“a specimen of human folly” / butterfly specimens). It seemed to be a great title for this project because a specimen is a thing that is artificially frozen in time (a recollection), and a singularity that also generalizes (which calls for an examination).RG: A theme in the book that stands out to me is that of the gulf between what we project and what is understood, what we transmit and receive, the gaps we leave, both consciously and unconsciously. Are there gaps to be found in what you intended for the book and how it turned out?SL: That’s such an acute observation, and an interesting question! Rather than gaps, to me the writing of the book shows how much perspectives can shift (i.e. how we can learn to acquire different eyes, how we can pick up a loving gaze). I had wanted the book to be on the colder side, and thought that was how it was executed, until very recently I realized how heartfelt it actually is. One of my best friends noticed that too: he read an early draft of this manuscript and told me it hurts because of its sharpness. Two years later, he read it again and told me this time it hurts because of its tenderness. I did not think I intended that tenderness, but it somehow came out in the writing.RG: How do you invoke a sense of place. To what extent does place feed into the direction of the book?SL: Places in this book are the center stage for disappearances (or absences). (“I was never there. Because he was never there. That city was forever defined by his absence.”) The book was organized into four parts, and each part, originally, had a title that was the name of a city. The whole thing was supposed to feel like a chase—a futile pursuit. A chase around the globe for a person or a phantom that was forever unattainable. She looked around and noticed things only because he wasn’t there. He wasn’t there—and that enabled her to live, only she didn’t know it at the time.RG:I often thought about the fact that he introduced himself to me in symbols (the Tarot cards, the music he chose to play, the Yuxi (玉溪) he smoked, the Bombay Sapphire he drank, as if it could only be this way). Literary and mythological vignettes. Symbols, fragments. Digestible bite-sized illusions. He recognized this too. Later on he said, “I was too broken when I first met you.” The book’s relationship to symbols is multifaceted, at once divining and obscuring, especially in relation to the attempt at knowing another person. What was your approach to the symbolic for Specimen?SL: It’s interesting—when you say “the symbolic” I think of the Symbolic of Jacques Lacan, the order of language and laws. According to Lacan, the symbolic is made possible because of our acceptance of the Name-of-the-Father, those laws that control both our desires and the rules of communication. In other words, the symbolic is both enabling and limiting. In Specimen, too, though it’s not quite the same thing, the symbols that float about both enable interpretation and limit imagination—they usurp the image of the other person, but their existence also enables the desire in the first place.RG: A dominant theme of the book is that of time. Specimen explores the limits of looking back on events from a distance, and poses questions on what stays with us, what part of the act of recollection can be trusted. At the conceptual stage, did this theme impact your decision on how to approach form and style for the book?SL: Definitely—it’s a curious (deeply melancholic) position to be writing about a version of oneself that is too distant to be completely legible. In an earlier draft of the book I discussed this dilemma more expressly: There’s nothing more alienating than standing face to face with your former self. That absolute distance—any exchange is doomed to be one-way. That’s why the “I” I’m using now is entirely fictional, and reading this lifeless record is the same thing as mourning, because those two people who had been talking to each other incessantly—and their incessant oscillations and fears and little defeats in life—no longer exist.RG: How do you view Specimen’s relationship to both memoir and fiction? Do you draw a firm line between reportage and narrative, or do boundaries blur? What is your approach to the tensions between these elements?SL: I’m glad you asked this question, because for a while I wasn’t sure whether Specimen was a novella or a short memoir. I didn’t quite decide which one until very late in the process, but to me that distinction didn’t matter as much. It had always been my goal to only speak my personal truth, to do my best to reconstruct and interrogate that part of my history, and to do all of that with full sincerity. In the end I chose to call it non-fiction, but it could very well have been labelled a novella. RG: Do you keep a journal, use notebooks? If so, has this practice impacted Specimen?SL: I kept a handwritten journal at various points in my life, but never did it consistently—and I lost most of those hand-written records after moving countries several times in the past decade. I do keep a lot of notes on my iPhone and still have them to this day. When I was writing Specimen, I mostly looked through those digital notes and text messages and chats on other instant messaging platforms, which helped me reconstruct the timeline and more importantly, what I was feeling back then. In that sense Specimen is a book by and for the first generation, I think, who recorded their youth through digital means.RG: I thought about this thing I once read somewhere: a writer is trying to write about an amorous affair in her youth. She could only do it in fragments and vignettes because she perceives no continuity in that passion. She writes down scenes, dialogues, traces of a memory, on index cards. She puts those cards into drawers, into various books as bookmarks. Years later, after moving and rearranging things and getting rid of things, she realizes all the cards have disappeared or disintegrated. What’s more, she no longer retains one single line from that great passion. What place does passion have in the book?SL: It very much is the book! I think I was only able to write it because of how blazing, gazing it all felt—how violent, almost, as it occurred, that obscured a lot of other things. I once had a conversation with Marie Darrieussecq about passion and love, and she said, “Love is common, trivial, ‘small’, not huge nor scary, love is on a day to day basis, love is regular when passion is intense and deadly. Love helps you to live, passion prevents you from living.” And I could not have put it better. Passion prevents you from living, but it often enables your writing.RG: Several dreams are recounted in the book. Do you dream about Specimen? SL: Dreams mean a lot to me. I tend to have vivid but mythical dreams that have no basis in reality (or so it seems to me). I do keep a log of them that I call my “dream log”—might become a book one day. I don’t dream about Specimen in any literal sense, but the book lives in a kind of dreamscape for me. Writing it felt like navigating a landscape where memory, desire, and uncertainty blur together—much like a dream. RG:I was never there. For instance, I would be making dinner with Nathalie, and she would ask me about my day. “Pas mal,” I said. There was nothing more I could add. In my philosophy class, I could faithfully transcribe everything on time and eternity and the essence of things, but back into the small kitchen in the fifteenth arrondissement, back to the day-to-day, I couldn’t speak a word about how I really felt about anything. A sense of melancholy detachment hangs over the book. Do you consider Specimen as capturing a particularly modern malaise?SL: Yes, I think so, not in the sense of diagnosing a generation, but in inhabiting a kind of quiet, persistent dislocation. It’s the feeling of being “at once myself and not myself.” The body is present, the gestures habitual, but the self is elsewhere, numbed or abstracted by the unsayable. We live in a time where we are inundated with language—surplus language, even—and yet the ability to translate ourselves to others often slips away from us. In a way the melancholy isn’t personal or generational; it’s structural—baked into how we live, how we love, how we try and often fail to connect.RG:A few weeks later I saw a painting at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, a painting by Edvard Munch called “Two Human Beings: The Lonely Ones.” A man and a woman had their back to us. The woman had long blonde hair. She wore a luminous white dress. The man was in a dark suit, a step behind the woman, with one of his legs stretching towards her, as if he were hesitating whether he should take that step. Something about this image of frozen uncertainty made me think of E., and about what is ever possible between two human beings, especially the lonely ones. I thought about us sitting on the floor of his room facing a big loaf of country bread as hard as rock, imitating the silence of the gods, and how I had felt that finally, I was beginning to know him. Another few years later, I saw this exhibition again in New York. This time I just felt sad. Edvard Munch’s Two Human Beings. The Lonely Ones (1894) features on the cover, and is mentioned in the book itself. How did you decide to use this as the cover image?SL: When I first saw that Munch painting in Paris (around the time when E. first broke my heart), I was struck by the space between the figures: it was not dramatic, not hostile, just… irresolvable. They’re close enough to touch, and yet they don’t. That distance—tender, painful, suspended—was exactly how it had felt with E. and how it had felt, writing Specimen. The painting suggests a kind of companionship shaped by silence, by what is withheld rather than expressed. It also evokes the strangeness of time: how people can drift through years beside each other and still remain, in some essential way, unknown. The image holds a tension I wanted the reader to feel before reading a single word.RG:Specimen is littered with references to literature, the use of excerpts, mention of works of art. What writers or artists, if any, do you consider as an influence? Are there works with an affinity to Specimen?SL: Around the time I was writing Specimen I was obsessed with Annie Ernaux (aren’t we all), so I definitely see the influences of, say, Simple Passion, or, A Girl’s Story. I thought about Natalia Ginzburg’s work a lot too. And I have completely forgotten about it until now, but around the time I finished Specimen, a friend of mine recommended Maggie Nelson’s Bluets to me, and I had said to him, this really reminds me of something I’ve been working on! RG: I found Specimen to be a form of spiritual and psychological archaeology, searching for applied meaning in fragments. Do you continue to analyse the book in retrospect? SL: That’s a beautiful question, and it touches on something essential about how Specimen was written. I did interpret the material closely as I was writing. The process was reflective, even analytical at times, but once the book was finished, I didn’t feel the need to keep revisiting it. I don’t return to it to extract further meaning. I trust what it became in the moment of making. Now, I’m more interested in how others read it. RG: A consistent theme is that of how much life is driven by miscommunications, how the quest for connection is at once imbued with the potentially impossible, absurd and joyful. Do you view the book as an act of connection? Has the book changed you?SL: Yes, I do think the book is, in some way, an act of connection, but maybe a paradoxical one. So much of Specimen is about the near-miss: people circling each other, reaching, misunderstanding, saying almost but not quite what they mean. I wanted to write into that space of near-miss, not to resolve it, but to give it form. So while the book acknowledges how difficult and often absurd real connection can be, the writing itself was a way of trying, of saying: this is how it felt, even if I couldn’t really say it in the moment. Whether that counts as connection or just the desire for it, I’m not sure, but the gesture matters to me.RG:Specimen is released by Split/Lip Press. What attracted you to work with them and how have you found that process?SL: I love independent presses and Split/Lip Press has always been one of my favorites. Last year, when I saw they were looking for non-fiction manuscripts, I submitted Specimen and that’s how it all began. And I couldn’t have found a better home for it. The whole team showed so much love and care and true understanding during the entire process of editing / designing / marketing. I felt very lucky and honored to be part of the Split/Lip family.RG: What were your dominant feelings upon completion of the book? And how do you reflect on Specimen, and your time writing it?SL: It’s odd, but it felt as if I had traveled through some distant, strange land, where I met some lovely people, had a great time, but eventually I had to return (had to!), and it was a little bit like that little boy Nils in The Wonderful Adventures of Nils. After he traveled all across Sweden on the back of a goose, he returned to his parents and said: Maman, papa, je suis grand et je suis de nouveau un homme! (I don’t know why but it’s always the French version that I remember—essentially he said, Mom, Dad, I’m big and I’m again a man!) It’s strange, but writing the book was like traveling on the back of a goose through a distant land, where I met all the best people I knew during my youth, and somehow I was meeting them for the first time as a real adult. RG: What is next for you?SL: I’m not completely sure yet. For the past few months I’ve been working on a millennial novel about a group of young professionals and expats in New York city, but I’m now moving away from that and will perhaps work on something more abstract, such as the “dream log” I mentioned. We’ll see!
In 2023, I published a novel called Pure Cosmos Club. For reasons still unclear to me, it was embraced by the downtown New York literary scene loosely known as “Dimes Square.” Despite the association, I never made real inroads—not because of the rumors (funded by Peter Thiel? Christian reactionaries?) but simply because I was too shy.One of the scene’s more prominent figures is Noah Kumin, founder of The Mars Review of Books. From afar, I watched his profile rise through various ventures: the magazine, a popular podcast, and a reputation for hosting raucous literary parties.When I saw on social media that he had written a novel, I reached out and asked him to send me a copy. Stop All the Clocks centers on Mona Veigh, a misanthropic programmer who’s developed a large language model capable of generating poetry. Her company, Hildegard 2.0, is acquired by a mysterious tech magnate named Avram Parr—who, we soon learn, has committed “suicide.” Something about Parr’s death doesn’t sit right with Veigh, and she sets out to solve the mystery, placing herself in the crosshairs of a plot by powerful tech overlords bent on reshaping human civilization.I’m pleased to report that Stop All the Clocks is a first-rate techno-thriller—sharp, urgent, and extremely timely.Matthew Binder: You’ve written two books with technology at their center, The Machine War and Stop All the Clocks. Given your background and clear interest in tech — a field where you could have pursued a lucrative career — what drew you toward committing yourself to writing instead? Noah Kumin: Robert Graves said something like: "There's no money in poetry. But there's no poetry in money, either."MB: With Stop All the Clocks, you’ve written a literary thriller. Which writers — whether literary or thriller — most shaped your approach to Stop All the Clocks? NK: I learned a lot from the writers I love. You might be able to guess who a few of them are. But I don't think I leaned on any of them very heavily for Stop All the Clocks. John Pistelli argued in his wonderfully perceptive review that this book heralds something entirely new: a break with the decayed modernist "literary fiction" model which has provided, over the past 75 years or so, ever-diminishing returns. Stop All the Clocks is meant to be a new type novel of ideas for the 21st century, and I'm not certain it has any direct predecessors. There's a German term I like: kulturroman, the novel of culture. We haven't had many of those in the States lately—not in a real way—and it's time we did.MB: How do you begin a novel? Did you know what was going to happen in the end from the very beginning? NK: I started with the last lines of the last poem, which came to my mind from a place I did not understand. I wanted to know what the poem meant. I had an idea of the sensation that the reader should have when he or she has finished the book. And I worked backwards from there.MB: In your novel, Mona creates a poetry-generating AI called Hildegard. At one point, she realizes her invention might contribute to the flattening of the literary landscape. I’ll admit I’m too wary of the future to follow the latest developments closely, but it seems inevitable that a flood of AI-generated novels is on the way — if it hasn’t already begun. How worried are you that human novelists could become obsolete, or do you think there are aspects of storytelling that only humans can capture? NK: Certainly LLMs will be able to outcompete humans at the generation of satisfactory bodice-rippers and pulp thrillers. But it doesn't do any good to worry. I write to say something that can't be said and to preserve that saying of the unsayable for those who will be able to understand without understanding. I only need a few readers in mind to feel it's worthwhile to keep on.MB: For a long time, the tech world was associated with the Left, but today Big Tech seems more aligned with the Right. In Stop All the Clocks, you write journal entries from the perspective of a techno-optimist titan. While the novel avoids falling into the typical Left–Right binary, were you thinking consciously about his political leanings as you wrote those entries?NK: I wanted to capture for posterity a new sort of person who is emerging in our age, as Turgenev did with Bazarov in Fathers and Sons. Not necessarily a left-right thing, though I understand if some see it that way.MB: A recent Compact Magazine essay, “The Vanishing White Male Author,” argues that white male writers have been largely shut out of the literary world over the past five years. For example, none of the last 70 finalists for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize have been straight white American men. Since 2020, no white man has been nominated for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Prize for debut fiction. And notably, not a single white American man born after 1984 has published a story in The New Yorker, while at least 25 other millennial writers have.You studied under Martin Amis at NYU. Given the shifts described in essays like this one, did you and Amis ever discuss how these trends might shape your prospects as a fiction writer?NK: Yes, it’s an interesting development. I suppose it means the field is pretty open for me. If I were to win one of those awards or have a short story published in the New Yorker, it might well generate a lot of interest and move a lot of product, since it’s such a rarity these days for those publications. But this is all business talk. Nothing like that came up when I was being mentored by Amis. He only talked craft, and I would have felt monstrously impertinent asking the great man about anything pertaining to business or money, though he is the author of the great chronicle of business and money, Money. Amis recognized that I had a good feel for voice and wanted me to focus more on my plotting. He told me to always keep in mind that the reader is just as busy and put upon as I am—advice which I feel has stood me in good stead.MB: Your publisher, Arcade, an imprint of Skyhorse, has a reputation for taking risks on work that other houses might find too controversial. What was your experience like navigating the publishing world and landing with Arcade?NK: It was a strange journey. It feels a little gauche to go over it. Sorry. But I'm very grateful to the team at Arcade for their intelligence and acumen.MB: A couple of years ago, you started The Mars Review of Books to publish serious literary criticism. I read that you’ve lately been more focused on editing than writing. Given that you’ve just published two books, is that still true?NK: The great Italian writer-publisher Roberto Calasso remarked that to be both a publisher and a writer is a bit like being both a commodities trader and a commodity. It’s a wonderful quip and absolutely true. It does lead to some schizophrenic tendencies. As a writer I try to write only what interests me. But as a publisher I must be a businessman first. Luckily I know how to compartmentalize.MB: What’s next for you?NK: I'm writing a book of nonfiction, tentatively titled The Mystagogues, about occult secrets in the work of a handful of 20th century writers. Either I'm crazy or I'm noticing something very important that most critics over the past 100 years have failed to notice. I feel it could actually have quite a broad audience, though it's technically "literary criticism."
There is a nightmarish quality to Christopher Zeischegg’s The Magician. I read the book twice, the first time through the haze of an all nighter—sleep deprivation and sleep paralysis hastening my descent into the blur of self destruction and bodily decay that the narrative presents. “Just a thing inside your body that won’t listen to your head,” a malignant acquaintance tells the narrator early in the novel, as a prescription of sorts for the root of all his problems. At dawn, this rings true. This distance between body and self, judgment and subconscious, good and evil, is perhaps the root of all that is hellish.The Magician was originally published in 2020 by indie press Amphetamine Sulphate but had, until recently, fallen out of circulation. The edition of The Magician that I read is a reissue, recently published by Apocalypse Party Press in November 2024 with an added introduction by author and artist Chris Kelso, and a new cover by Christopher Norris. Zeischegg intended for the novel to be consumed as a triptych, accompanied by a short film and an art book, but these are unavailable to me, and so the novel stands alone, a highly corporeal narrative speaking for itself without visual supplement. In The Magician, Christopher Zeischegg, a fictional protagonist who shares the author's name, lurches through California in a hallucinatory descent into horror, gore, torture, and the occult. Christopher, in his early thirties, is a former porn star (he shares the author’s former adult film alias of Danny Wylde) who has left the industry after abusing performance drugs, and is now embroiled in an unsalvageable relationship with his drug addicted and deeply suicidal girlfriend Andrea. The novel opens with Andrea’s latest suicide attempt, the first line of the novel echoing text on the back cover, seemingly intent on provoking the reader into intrigue and/or horror for what is in store—“Andrea’s gore was dark red, nearly brown, and smelled of meat and piss. She must have wet herself on account of the drugs…”There is little value in a book that seeks only to shock, and in its self identification, The Magician seems to dare the reader to draw this immediate conclusion. Zeischegg is a former porn star, the novel is auto fiction and body horror and it places itself in Los Angeles, in the porn industry, in a land of devil worship and torture and addiction. The reissue of the novel comes only four years after the original publication, but those four years have been formative for the collective understanding of autofiction, for the Literary Thrill-Seeking Industrial Complex, for Bret Easton Ellis and his imitators, for the contrarian, the provocateur, for autofiction often that is now a*tofiction because this author is ironic, this author realizes that our absorption with ourselves is becoming a bit obscene. There is admitted sensationalism in the very names of those championing Zeischegg’s work: “Amphetamine Sulphate” and “Apocalypse Party Press”, the latter of which comes with some warnings of its own: “Anyone with an open mind is welcome to join the party” “Once the void swallows you whole, you'll never be the same.”Still, beyond those first few pages, it becomes clear that The Magician is more than just a challenge for the daring. At what Christopher refers to as an Alcoholics-Lovers Anonymous (AL-Anon) meeting, he runs into Jayla, another porn star who he filmed with in the past. She attacks him with pepper spray and harvests his blood for Satanic supernatural purposes. This, of course, sets off a downward spiral of torture, violence that remains Christopher’s seemingly only consistent tether to reality, and a throughline for the novel. The Magician contrasts searing physical pain with a dissociated gaze and occasional poignant descriptions of the mountains on the horizon of the Los Angeles night sky.We follow Christopher pining for Andrea, gasping for air in a body bag by the LA River, and then desperate to expel the demons that are destroying himself and his family whilst seeking refuge in his deeply religious mother’s home. As his problems scale towards the cosmic and the supernatural, the seemingly sensational opening lines become points of almost absurdist inconsequentiality. Suicide and addiction, as it turns out, are luxury problems amidst a reckoning with the occult. Autofiction can bore in its needlessly self referential nature, but The Magician deals more in the realm of the alter ego. Noir can falter in a didactic rendering of good and evil, but there is a banality to the way the narrative swallows and stomachs the ever-worsening horror of the world it exists within, which lends itself almost to absurdity. Zeischegg has described the novel as a parallel to the years following his own departure from the porn industry, and yet The Magician does not deal heavily in metaphor. Christopher, for all his drifting, disassociated, tendencies, is a reliable narrator. One never suspects that his hallucinatory recollections are, in actuality, hallucinations. One never suspects that the demon clawing at his stomach is a stand-in for something more abstract. The gashes on his stomach are real, as is his mother’s graying skin and progressing illness in the company of Christopher and his demon; as is the instant resurrection of order when—with the help of a full moon, hen’s blood and the wood from a cypress tree—he is able to expel the demon. There are moments of body horror throughout the novel that make me reflexively gag, but for the most part, reading The Magician is a steady experience. The banality of evil is established, enforced, and then reinforced again and again and again. You have entered into some realm of darkness. The rules are different here. Christopher, intuitively, seems to grasp this immediately. He does what he can to survive. His suffering, at least, serves as a reminder that he is real. The novel begins with Christopher insistent on his normalcy. At an AL-Anon meeting he tunes into another young man’s speech because “he was young and vibrant and I could imagine us being friends” He does not identify with the freaks, and strikingly, he does nothing very wrong to become one. The narrative, while cohesive, is driven by whim and bad luck. Christopher becomes who he is because he is chosen as a host for this demon. The rest of it, and even this circumstance in and of itself, is left up to chance. The Magician ends not too far from how it began. After ridding himself of his demon, Christopher is normal, gaining weight, aging, still in his mother’s home and now, a bit discontent. “I used to be a porn star,” he tells a young woman after she refers to him as a “fat fuck”. Finally free from his own demon, he has attended a party with a local magician who he hopes might teach him his ways. It happens that this magician got here mostly by a stroke of desperate luck—he stumbled upon a Magick book in the woods after shooting himself in the head. And as it turns out, after escaping torture of the supernatural scale, Christopher is now bored.“I was someone who had bent the world to my will,” Christopher insists in the novel’s final pages. This identification with self autonomy is in sharp contrast to the passivity that defines him throughout the book, and yet he speaks with sincerity. He has mistaken adjacency to a power that beheld him with agency over a power he could never really harness. The Magician moralizes nothing. There are no clear conclusions as to where the novel’s dreamscape intersects with auto-fictional reality. Still, if there is a conclusion outside of the vacuum world into which The Magician sucks readers, it lies here. From dust to dust, and from mundane to mundane. Zeischegg speaks to the alter egos which we craft, suffer with, and live in along the way.
The novella is famously “pocket-sized,” and marketed as such, in the relatively rare case when a publisher feels whimsical enough to produce one. Crassly, it is a work of fiction which achieves that mystical, begrudging minimum page length that warrants its nestling between front and back covers all on its own. And we as modern readers (forgive the assumption) respond to it as a physical object the way we respond to almost anything that is a smaller version of something else: with a kind of simple, unintimidated affection, the result of our own enlargement in its presence maybe, with anticipatory amusement, with the hope of fun—but no real expectation of “awe.”Being “fun-sized,” we want it when we want just a little something. Being “pocket-sized,” we keep it on us in case of boredom. It is dwarfed by the tomes on the nightstand. In fact, it has slipped between the mattress and bed frame and is lost—oh well. It does not concuss you when dropped on your head from a height. It is unsalable. It is ineligible for masterwork status.Formally, it is my favorite mode of fiction. And so I want to dispute that the diminutive “la” indicatesa minor achievement. That the novella is not an immature form, or a form of modesty, or a running out of steam I hope can be generally accepted. But if not the simple failing to reach, either maturity or for loftier artistic goals, and undertaken with something specific in mind, to achieve something specifically—what then? What is it for?What makes the novella so wonderful, I think, is that it is a prolonged narrative—long enough to lose yourself in—that nonetheless you can read in its entirety, in a reasonable interval, with attention unbroken. You may enjoy it as a whole, and examine it immediately afterwards, with no slippage of memory. Because it remains intact. Because it is “human brain-sized.” It fits us, and on occasion, close to perfectly. To mix metaphors and organs: something smaller would leave you unsatisfied. A portion larger and you risk suffering from overindulgence. It feeds well your hungry eyes. It fills the mind-stomach pleasantly.Speaking of nourishment, that historically the novella has been a vehicle for moralizing is easy enough to understand. A reader can tolerate only so much didacticism (no more than 40 thousand words), after which the book is customarily thrown across the room. This is not the project of all novellas, of course. And modern readers, I imagine, are suspicious of such a project and disinclined to didactic literature announcing itself as such. But is this not a worthy project? Can such a work be a joy?Here are three books publishing this summer that engage with the aforementioned novella rubric, including its “moralizing” aspect (complementary), and which I recommend. That they play so freely in the same territory while maintaining total formal difference from one another also recommends them. They give a sense of the range of the novella form. They are exacting, ambitious, and instructive “smaller” works that mean to be what they are.Fresh, Green Life by Sebastian Castillo (Soft Skull, 2025)Fresh, Green Life is a novel 160 pages in length by Sebastian Castillo. Its time is spent half in examination of the narrator (Sebatián Castillo)’s idyllic, un-idyllic, misguided, haphazard, tender collegiate years as part of a small cohort of philosophy students in the tutelage of their disaffected, lazy, middling, lonely, unclean, full-of-shit, nonetheless better-versed and more advanced Professor, and half in anticipation of a New Year’s Eve reunion, years later, of all previously mentioned, but especially the once unavailable and now divorced Maria, at the aging Professor’s house in suburban Philadelphia. It is a tale told in the language of learning that suspects a gaping emptiness beneath all erudition. Its subject—as portrayed in the readings, musings, speeches, resolutions and vows of Sebatián—is the limits of Moral Philosophy with regards to the possibility of individual human betterment. Via Sebatián we are inclined to wonder: Does the life of contemplation not in-fact result in experience-naivety and lifeforce-crippling inaction? Isn’t there somewhere else a person should focus their efforts, somewhere out in the real world—the gym, for example? And who is all this improvement for anyway? Moral Philosophy may in fact be a trap, and yet Sebatián’s every trial must necessarily run the gauntlet of the philosophic tradition, must come into contact with all the great names, before it can be properly processed or at least buried away. And, uncomfortable or deeply uncomfortable, all improvement must be proved in the end, by presenting oneself before someone else who will form their own judgement, idealized or fucked as they themselves may be in one’s estimation. You will enjoy this novel(la) if you relish confronting delusions great and small, if you love philosophy, if you hate philosophy, if you revel in the language of erudition, if you suspect a gaping emptiness beneath all learning but hope very much to find something there.Patchworkby Tom Comitta (Coffee House Press 2025)The provocation of Patchwork, as with Comitta’s earlier The Nature Book, is supposed to be that it is not “authored” in the traditional sense, but stitched together from hundreds of texts, both obscure and well-known, spanning genres and historical epochs. But a book like this, in principle, shouldn’t trouble readers acquainted with other so-called “experimental” works deploying the technique of decoupage or assemblage. If there is any controversy with regard to The Nature Book, it should be surrounding the fact that it is a novel without any people in it— people being the novel’s primary reason to exist as an art form. As for Patchwork, it is a narrative fully populated with human beings, so many you are meant to lose track. Meet and enjoy them as they quickly vanish into the swirling background. There is a “plot,” and a fetish object to be gone in search of (a snuffbox), which lends itself to allegory if you badly want it to. There is the promise of love and adventure and misadventure, but these occur more as the conscious experience of the delirious effects of cacophonous language rather than via any character whose fictional status must be kept in denial. It is a didactic work insomuch as it hopes to reinforce a reverence for all manner of literary modes of language. Comitta senses that if the spell of their technique is to hold, and their moral be delivered, their book must not go on forever, though it could. Here the novella’s humanizing circumscription/compression dynamic comes to Comitta's aid. (Patchwork is published through Coffee House’s NVLA series). Now, if you are to grant the premise of the jacket copy—that this is a story stitched together “seamlessly”—here is where you will need to apply your goodwill and suspend disbelief. Your level of readerly enjoyment will have an inverse relationship to your level of tight-assed exertion in attempting to hold onto every thread. If you are an enthusiastic reader of John Ashbery—how his writing washes over you, leaving in its tide all manner of glittering linguistic debris—you will have a great time reading Patchwork. If you are one of the few who have read and enjoyed Ted Berrigan’s "western novel" Clear the Range, you will recognize this place and be quite happy here.Information Ageby Cora Lewis (Joyland Editions, July 2025)“I work for the newswire, and I cover the economy, plus politics. I’m still getting the rhythm of it,” the narrator of Information Age informs the reader, and adjusting to this “newswire rhythm” is also the reader’s task. Lewis, a journalist when she is not writing fiction, tells her tale in staccato increments of images, dialogue, anecdote, and episode. Interpersonal and neutrally reported scenes, fragments that will amount to private epochs and world-historical events, are related interspersed, undifferentiated in tone or page time. The result is that familiar feeling of onslaught that we are accustomed to from scrolling timelines, but made pleasurable through Lewis’ skill, and because, though relentless and benumbing, we know a novella is taking shape. The narrator’s professional burden is to somehow make coherent news stories from an endless glut of amorphous material. The idea that there can exist a talent for this in certain individuals, “an ear,” begs the question of due vs undue responsibility with regards to those shaping reality for the rest of us. That the journalist might instead be a mere conduit, a mystical model of media, is also considered, if rather skeptically. But the true subject of the book, it seems to me, is the potential impossibility of forming a theory of individual rectitude in an apparently hostile era of technological acceleration, institutional decomposition and soon-expected environmental collapse. Too vast a problem to approach head on, it is wisely dramatized and brought down to scale through the narrator’s varied relationships, the people she knows and doesn’t, their respective predicaments, how they touch the narrator’s life and how they entangle. Add to this modern womanhood. Add the desire for children and their real possibility. Add personal ambition. Add the competing urges to lose and/or find oneself in someone else, in pleasure, to be still or travel, to leave things in the past or drag them with and subject them to imperfection, to act with the conception of a future in mind, to mourn in advance. What possibilities does language offer us? Are we, in so many ways, doomed (by our need for meaning-making)? Did I mention that the book is funny? Well it is at times, and melancholy. And its landscapes and people carefully rendered. You will enjoy this book if you have dissociated in the recent past, if time feels disjointed or has lately become a pleasant or unpleasant blur, if you think about sex, if “you’re experiencing a profound alienation from the production and dissemination of information” but you’re up for reading a novella.
