Interviews & Reviews

IT DOESN’T END WHEN YOU CLOSE THE BOOK: AN INTERVIEW WITH KEVIN M. KEARNEY by Leo Vartorella

June 24, 2025

Kevin M. Kearney’s latest novel FREELANCE (Rejection Letters, 2025) is a dystopian thriller. It is a psychological profile of loneliness in the age of OnlyFans. It is a condemnation of AI and the gig economy. It is the story of a young man’s search for purpose, part character study and part surreal, page-turning romp. Above all, it is a lot of fun. The novel follows Simon, a driftless 19-year-old driver for the rideshare app HYPR, whose world is upended when the app offers him a seemingly life-changing opportunity. This combination of breadth, emotional acuity and fast-moving plot is nothing new for Kearney. His debut novel HOW TO KEEP TIME (Thirty West, 2022) is a portrait of marriage and family that reads like a mystery, with a dose of New Jersey folklore thrown in for good measure. In short, his books do a lot. Ahead of the publication of FREELANCE on May 31, I connected with Kearney over video call to discuss his writing process, building a universe across books and why Philadelphia is the perfect setting for a sci-fi noir. Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity. Leo Vartorella: So FREELANCE is a book that touches on a lot of big themes. You’ve got AI, the gig economy, and coming of age as a young man on the internet to name a few. Did you set out to tackle all these themes from the beginning or did they kind of come up organically as you were writing the book?Kevin M. Kearney: I think the short answer is no. I had the idea to write about an Uber type driver. I thought that would make for a good narrative conceit, because you've got this character who, by the necessity of his job, has to interact with all these different people throughout the course of the day. So as a writer, it's entertaining, because you can just say, well, who would I like to show up next? Pretty much anyone with a smartphone in Philly could show up in his back seat. So what does that look like? It kind of started as a game, just to play and see what happens. And then I started realizing that it could be something larger, and it could probably be a novel. So that’s when some of those themes started showing themselves. Some of them were obvious in retrospect, but at the time they kind of came out of the storytelling.I left teaching and moved across the country in 2022, and I also started writing this book in August 2022 as soon as I moved to California. At first, I thought I was just writing this story about this rideshare driver. Very quickly I realized, oh, I'm actually writing about teaching, and I'm processing what it means that I'm no longer in the classroom. And then I also realized, oh, I'm writing about Philly because I'm no longer in Philly, and I'm processing what that city is or what my experience with it was. And then I very quickly realized, oh, all the things I'm writing about teaching are actually about work. LV: And what about Simon in particular? What drew you to him as a character and how did he start to take shape for you?KK: I taught high school for 10 years in Philly. I taught at this all-boys Catholic school that I also attended as a student, which is a whole other story. I had a lot of students throughout that decade who were a lot like Simon, kids who are a little over their heads, kids who maybe don't know what they don't know, but who are just trying to forge a path and figure out who they are and who they want to be. So I think that was the main inspiration. I felt like I'd interacted with this kid many, many times and the more I wrote about it, I realized at various points in my life, I had also been that kid.LV: From a construction standpoint, I really admire how you write chapters. They are always building momentum and leaving me as a reader wanting more, and I feel like you really know how to end them in a satisfying way without it feeling too on the nose. What do you look to accomplish in a chapter and how do you think about them as narrative units?KK: That's a great question, and I appreciate you saying that, because it's something that I have really worked on. You use the word unit, and I think that's the perfect way to describe it. I haven't thought about it in that way, but that's absolutely accurate. It is its own thing, right? It’s a living, breathing element in and of itself. It's not the same thing as a short story because it’s pushing along this much larger narrative. So I think of it more like a joke, like in the context of a sketch or a stand-up set. Sometimes a joke can stand on its own, but a lot of times they are much more satisfying and a lot funnier in the context of the larger thing, but they are also units that can exist on their own, because there's a premise, there's a setup, and then there's a punchline. And so I think when I'm writing a chapter, I'm always hoping that there's a buildup, there's a setup, and then there is some sort of punchline, even though a lot of times it's not funny. But there's something about how the end of a chapter lands that not only feels satisfying – you could close the book, if you want, and feel like an idea has been realized – but that hopefully it’s going to make you want to turn the page, because you're going to see that replicated in the next chapter and the next.LV: To speak about plot and momentum more generally, this book really zips along. We could use the phrase page turner. How do you think about plot as you're writing? Are you an outliner or are you figuring it out as you go?KK: I appreciate that, because that's something I think about a lot. I love page turners. I think for some people, that's seen as less than, like it’s a trait of genre fiction that maybe certain literary types kind of turn their nose up at. But I think it's really admirable and quite difficult to keep it moving and to make it feel entertaining and engaging enough to keep someone constantly turning that page. In terms of plot overall, I think for a long time I am writing scenes and just figuring out who the character is. And my process, when I first start something, is I'm just writing completely fragmented scenes, and I don't exactly know who the characters are, I don't exactly know where it's going. Sometimes just a paragraph, and then sometimes that's several paragraphs, and then maybe a sentence, but I'm just trying to get as many things down on the page as possible. And then over time, those connections start to make themselves more obvious to me, and I can start to see the threads between those seemingly disconnected fragments, and then I can start piecing things together. Then I can put together a pretty broad outline of where the story starts, where it's going to go next, and where, ultimately, I hope that it winds up. As the process goes on and things become more refined, I get a pretty detailed outline, and especially when I'm revising drafts, I'm outlining pretty intensely and doing reverse outlines to see if the story architecture actually holds up and makes sense.LV: In both of your books, a key element of that architecture is the way you deploy shifts in point of view. You don't really seem restricted about how you do it or when you do it, and I think it works very effectively. Sometimes you come back to a character, or sometimes like with Simon's parents or Tamika, we might just spend one chapter with them. How do you think about when and how you're shifting point of view?KK: Well, I think part of it is just like a very dumb reader view of it, which is that as soon as it starts to feel boring, hearing from the same person, that's usually a sign for me that I need to start moving in another direction. In the reverse outline that I mentioned, it’s one of the main things that I'm looking at. So when I'm reading the first full draft of a project, I ignore whatever previous outline I had, and as I'm reading it and marking it up, I'm outlining it as it exists on the page. So here's what happens in one chapter and here's whose perspective it's from, or here are the characters who are involved in the scene. And that allows me to then have a Google Doc that's pretty much just one page, and I can see I've got this character's perspective for eight chapters in a row. I’m always asking myself, is this interesting or has this become stale or mundane? Is this balanced structurally? Just trying to look at it all as objectively as possible.LV: I think some of the strongest characters across both your books are the parents. One element of the parent-child relationship that you explore nicely is intergenerational communication. Beyond their family connection, parents and children are products of different eras trying to figure each other out. Especially in a book like FREELANCE, why was it so important to give voice to Simon's parents?KK: That’s a great question, because someone who read an early draft said they thought I should cut the parents, there’s no need to hear from them. So I went back and tried to see if that would be possible, and I just thought that it would be totally unrealistic to think that there's this 19-year-old kid who had all these struggles, whose parents don't have any window into his life. I mean, obviously that type of person exists, but I think that that's a pretty rare experience now, considering who Simon is and where it's coming from. So I thought that it was essential. Also, I mentioned earlier that I had taught so many kids who were like Simon, and I inevitably met all their parents because they were failing out of school, or they were socially struggling in some way. So I would be emailing with these parents or talking with them on the phone or sitting with them in guidance counselor meetings or parent teacher conferences, and I really felt for these people, even though sometimes I could see how their parenting was maybe facilitating or passively encouraging their kids’ struggles. But, you know, they're just people who are trying to figure out what's wrong with their kid, or where maybe they went wrong with their kid. They're really grasping at straws and trying to fix this problem that is way more complicated than a simple fix.LV: Yeah, I mean, it's believable that there's a 19-year-old Simon who's going through life and not thinking about his parents, but that there are parents who are thinking about him is the important perspective that really adds a roundness to the book.KK: Thank you. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure that my therapist would have something to say about this, but I always find that I'm writing about parents, always writing about work. LV: Throw Catholicism in there and you’ve got the trifecta.KK: [Laughs] Right, and I'm always writing about a Catholic school. That always works its way in.LV: I feel like Cassie is a character who grows increasingly important as FREELANCE progresses. How crucial do you think her perspective is in a book that's otherwise about this driftless young man?KK: Yeah, I think it's crucial. She’s the wise character, not that she's perfect by any means. I don't think anyone in the book, or in life, is perfect, but she sees through all the things that hamstring Simon and a lot of the other characters, and she realizes that defining your identity by your profession is a losing game. It's a trap. But also defining your identity based on social capital, like maybe Dylan does, is also a trap. So that scene with her and Maya at the end, I think that is the crux of not only her arc, but the book as a whole. She’s not even a mother: she's Cassie. And even that name is a construction. Even that is artificial. She is this energy, this spirit, for lack of a better word. All the other things are artificial, and I think she sees through that, whereas Simon is really hung up on how he's perceived by others and whether or not he's successful enough.LV: Speaking of how he’s perceived by others, Simon lives with a group of privileged post-college kids who feel like they are figuring out their lives, but they're all on a path to security and success that is very foreign to Simon, whose trajectory is much more precarious. Tell me about putting Simon in a house with these people. Why was that important?KK: I think the first reason is that Philly is filled with people like that. It would be fair to say that I have been that person at times too, who's sort of poor but not poor, right? Sort of cosplaying poverty because you just graduated college. So for one, it felt realistic. If you're writing about people in their 20s in Philly, that's a not insignificant portion of the population. It was also supposed to echo Simon's experience in high school. A very elite school that’s in the city but not necessarily of the city. And I think it’s a dynamic he could look at and wonder if his whole life is going to feel outside of these people, removed from them and completely isolated when he tries to relate to them about seemingly normal things.LV: Staying with Philly for a sec, something I noticed in HOW TO KEEP TIME and FREELANCE is a similar arc for the characters where they go through a lot of shit in Philly, and the city kind of spits them out into Jersey. What is it about each of these places and the relationship between them that makes them so compelling to write about?KK: Yeah, that's a great question. I think that a lot of people in Philly, and maybe even a lot of people in New Jersey, view Jersey as this other planet. Even across the country, when I mention to people that I grew up in New Jersey, they think of a different New Jersey than the one that I grew up in. I grew up in South Jersey, which is like a Philadelphia suburb that very quickly becomes farmland and woods.Philly is very strange in its own ways, very haunted in its own ways. I think New Jersey feels like a counterpart to that. It’s also very strange, but in different ways, and very haunted in different ways. And it feels like a place that you could be exiled to. With Mercer in HOW TO KEEP TIME, that's the place where he's trying to get his head on straight and figure things out. And for Simon in FREELANCE, that's where he's cordoned off, a purgatory of sorts.LV: You mentioned you started writing FREELANCE after you had moved to California. Compared to the process of writing your first book, how was it different writing about Philly and Jersey from across the country?KK: With HOW TO KEEP TIME, the only way that I could think to do that was that fragmentary process I was talking about, taking all these seemingly disconnected scenes and making them work in a narrative. A lot of it was my day-to-day experience in the city or in the Pine Barrens, things I noticed, things that stood out to me – pretty much notes – then fictionalizing them and putting them in this very dramatic narrative. So I was able to, in real time, see something and then immediately put it into the story.Being 3000 miles across the country and trying to write about the place, that was about mining my memory. And I think the result of that is a more heightened or surreal version of the city. And when I started to realize that, I thought, oh, it would be cool to try and make this feel like a noir or a suspenseful thriller. So I started reading Raymond Chandler books to try and see how you make it feel like there are shadows everywhere, something always lurking around the corner.LV: I love Chandler.KK: Yeah, I hadn't read him before, and when I moved to California, I thought I should read a bunch of California books. Chandler was one of the things that seemed the most obvious, so I read The Big Sleep and The High Window. And I was thinking I should write a sci-fi noir, so I was reading those Chandler books and then, in quick succession, also read Neuromancer and the novelization of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I'd never read before. It’s really fun. So I was using my memory of not just what I moved away from, but also Philadelphia in 2010 when I first moved there as an adult, and then trying to infuse it with these hyper-real or surreal elements that sci-fi and noir allow.I also read this book called Hustle and Gig by Alexandria Ravenel. It's a sociological study of gig work including Uber, Airbnb, Task Rabbit, and a company called Kitchensurfing. It was super helpful, because it gave me actual data and experiences of people who have gone through this that were vetted by an academic. Because I was also reading tons of forum posts, subreddits from Lyft and Uber drivers, to get a sense of what the job is actually like on the ground. But it was nice to have the academic text to complement that and verify things. Because I think there's a lot of bluster on these forums, which are incredible texts in and of themselves. They are fascinating to read, because, for one, they're not written with any sort of artistic pretense. They're really just written a lot of times to blow off some steam or to talk some shit. And I think that's refreshing to read – something that is so intentionally anti-intellectual. There is no hoping that someone thinks they're smart because they wrote this. They’re doing it to express a feeling. I'm fascinated by digital texts like that in general, stumbling upon something on the internet that is made public for literally the entire world to see, and yet you still feel like this is a private document that you're not supposed to have seen. I love that. So then playing around with writing my own, it was fun. In terms of reader experience, I thought it was a nice way to break up the narrative and hit refresh every once in a while. Also, it allowed for a lot of indirect exposition.LV: You’ve mentioned how Catholicism and Catholic school are themes in both of your books. What impact does religion have on the lives of your characters?KK: I wish I had some thematic reason for why I write about Catholic characters, and, more specifically Irish-Catholic characters, but I think at the end of the day I’m writing from my own immediate experience. I also think there’s a lot of strange ethnic traditions that have nothing to do with religion but everything to do with Catholic or Irish-Catholic identity. In HOW TO KEEP TIME, it's the inability to say the thing – the absolute deferral to silence whenever something gets potentially uncomfortable. And I think that animates a lot of the tension between Simon and his parents. His dad in particular can't bring himself to say that his son is depressed, because what if that sets him on this certain path that's going to lead to all these other problems that could have been avoided if we had just not said that, right? His mom is more open, but probably too much. She’s probably overbearing with the amount that she's willing to say the thing. I don't know, it's something I constantly plug into, and I have found that there's no shortage of inspiration with writing about that world.LV: Speaking of HOW TO KEEP TIME, I was very happy to see Mercer make a cameo in FREELANCE. It’s not a particularly important episode for Simon, but it felt like a pretty revealing coda to see where Mercer is now, and kind of worked like an aftershock that brought me back to the world of that book. Why did you want both of these books to take place in the same universe?KK: Well, I think you describing it as an aftershock is incredible. That’s the effect that I was looking for. I love writers who build universes and then slowly expand them over the course of their bibliography. When I was in high school reading Vonnegut and burning through his books, seeing Kilgore Trout appear in multiple places, Eliot Rosewater too, I just thought, wow, this is so cool that a writer gets to do that. That they get to build this entire world.LV: Reading Vonnegut in high school and hitting your second Kilgore Trout mention – nothing can match that high.KK: Totally. I also love Jennifer Egan and I think she does that really well. She has built a universe of all these characters that start out in A Visit from the Goon Squad, and then they show up in a number of her short stories published after that, and then she wrote sort of like a sequel, but it's all about these very seemingly minor, peripheral characters from the first book. I think that's just so exciting as a reader and as a writer. It's incredible that you get to build your own universe, not just for a single book, but one that lives throughout an entire body of work. It's really fun and hopefully it maybe adds to a deeper sense of realism for a reader who's following book to book. This story does not begin on page one and end when you close the book, it actually continues. I have another idea that I'm working on right now, and it's about St. Luke's, the Catholic school that is in HOW TO KEEP TIME and FREELANCE, so that might be another way to kind of continue the universe.

ALL OUR TOMORROWS: AN INTERVIEW WITH AMY DEBELLIS by Chris Dankland

June 17, 2025

Over the last year or so, Amy DeBellis has been one of my favorite newer short story writers. Now she has a new novel, ‘All Our Tomorrows,’ published by CLASH Books, which is one of my favorite books of the year.Her writing is so skillful: the language, the plots, the pacing, the characters. But I also love her writing because I find many of her stories to be dark and bleak. To me, her stories feel steeped in depression, menace, and a kind of claustrophobic doom. I want to present the reader some examples of stories we’ve published by DeBellis:‘Purgatory’ –- a short story about a teen who becomes infatuated with a boy at her highschool who is killing animals. Soon he teaches her how to hunt and they start shooting animals together in the woods: deer, foxes, frogs. At one point the boy says: “Only ever point the rifle at things you are willing to destroy.” Then the story says: “She thinks of aiming it at every tree on her property, at her house, at her mother’s car. Into the open cavern of her own skull.” The story ends with them shooting the neighbor’s cat.‘His Body’ — a short story about a woman whose husband has caught an STD that causes incurable lesions to break out all over his body. The holes in the flesh never go away, until eventually his entire body is covered in them.We also published three micros by her:‘Yakutsk’ — about a woman who is getting ready to wander alone into the frozen taiga‘Wake’ — about a woman at her mother’s funeral. First sentence: “Morning: the sun smears blood across the sky.” And a micro titled: ‘Even My Fantasies Are Chronically Ill.’I spoke with DeBellis about her writing.

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Chris Dankland: Hi Amy! Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me. Do you feel like your writing as a whole tends toward the melancholic, or does it only show up in certain pieces? Is that feeling something you consciously cultivate and lean into, or does it emerge naturally? Amy DeBellis: I do think it leans towards the melancholic as a whole. (In fact, it’s like the Tower of Pisa with how much it leans…) I’m trying to think of a piece I’ve written in the last couple of years that doesn’t have that darkness, and I’m coming up short. Even humorous pieces (“Upgrade” in HAD, for example, or “Persistence” in Roi Fainéant) have elements of darkness in them—it’s just that that darkness isn’t played straight the way it is in the majority of my writing. Yeah, it’s in everything. It emerges naturally. I love beautiful things—for me, in many ways, the written word is the ultimate form of beauty—but I also believe you can’t have beauty without something to contrast it. That discordant note. That, to quote Donna Tartt, “little speck of rot”. Except for me it’s a little bit more than a speck. CD: To me, your stories often feel physically heavy. Sometimes I get a weird image when I read your work of a stone sinking in water. You are very good at embodying emotion and describing it in a tactile way. Your stories feel like they live in the body: grief shows up as fatigue, sorrow has weight, dread feels like muscle tension. Is this a conscious part of your craft, this physical translation of emotional states? AD: I love the image of the stone! And that’s a huge compliment, that my writing could give you this mental image. I’ve always believed that the body is the seat of memory. There’s this wonderful Stephen King quote: “Art consists of the persistence of memory.” So the body and art are inextricably linked, being as they are both holders and representations of memory. And since the present runs continuously into the past, almost everything not held by the future is already a memory. I personally feel emotions very strongly, so no, it’s not really conscious that this comes across in my work. I mean, of course I try to choose the best descriptors for a feeling of dread, but the translation of emotional states to the physical—I believe it’s the most powerful way to get across emotion to a reader who might not have experienced the same thing that’s happening in the story. Let’s say there is a story about a grieving widow. Not everyone knows what it’s like to have lost a husband, or even to have lost a close family member, but everyone knows the feeling of grief. Describing it as a physical sensation is a way to bring the reader into their body (not their mind, where they’re thinking Oh but I was never a grieving widow) and force them to feel the emotions of the piece. CD: I feel like the three main characters in ‘All Our Tomorrows’ are all stuck in a depressive rut at the beginning of the book. The characters are isolated in the sense that they are always wearing some sort of mask around most people. They don’t feel a real human connection with others, and this only starts to change near the end of the book when the characters meet.For most of the book, each character seems trapped in their own depressive logic, their own sealed inner monologue. Was it challenging to bring them out of that headspace and allow for genuine human contact?AD: It was a bit difficult, but it was also really fun. I massively enjoyed describing each character from the viewpoint of the others—it allowed me to view them from the outside looking in, for once. I am not one of those writers (no shade to them though) who says that their characters are speaking to them in their head. But for the scene where they all meet—particularly the second one where they’re all together—I kind of just let the words flow. My characters took the reins more than ever before. I truly had no idea what Janet was going to say when [redacted]*, for example. Or when Gemma figured out that [redacted]*. It was truly magical seeing their personalities come alive on the page. *I am keeping everyone safe from spoilers. CD: I feel that climate change is mostly unstoppable. I have little to no hope that humans will solve this problem, and I believe that things are only going to continue to get worse from here on. Humans are survivors, but I think that the Earth in which humans will have to live, 200 or 300 years from now, will be so degraded that it won’t be all that different from hell. I don’t feel hope for the future, in the long run. The existential threat of climate change is a worry hanging over the heads of all three main characters in ‘All Our Tomorrows.’ How do you personally feel about climate change?AD: Sadly, I agree with you. I think we’ve all seen over the past few years that even if humans could solve this problem, we wouldn’t want to. And by “we” I mean the people who run the world, the CEOs of megacorporations, the billionaires who wreak the most environmental damage. It’s my opinion that they are almost uniformly psychopathic in their behavior and their lack of empathy. No normal person would want to do the things they’ve had to do in order to gain their position—and I believe that if a normal person did find themselves with that much power, they wouldn’t remain normal for very long. On the one hand, I truly enjoy my laptop, and my phone that allows me to contact my friends overseas. And parasite-free, running water. And medicine! But I also believe that our modern way of life is an aberration, a blip, almost a wrinkle in the way things are designed to be on earth. We are not entitled to live this way, it is not sustainable, and we are paying the price. People forget that for the overwhelming majority of human history, we lived in hunter-gatherer tribes. The Neolithic Revolution (when humans first began to farm) happened only ten thousand tears ago, which is around 3% of the time Homo sapiens have existed. And the Industrial Revolution, which gave us our industrial capitalism and modern infrastructure and nearly everything we feel entitled to as a part of “regular life,” happened so recently that only about 0.08% of human history has occurred after that. It’s mindblowing that we’ve caused so much damage to our planet in such a tiny fraction of time.And that 0.08% is what we think of as normal. Our own lives are so short in comparison that, looking back along the eight or so generations that have lived since the Industrial Revolution, it really does seem like it’s been forever. There’s a part in All Our Tomorrows where one of the main characters is thinking about the spiral drawing that’s mean to represent all the eras on earth — something like this, but colorful. Most of it is blue and green. Only the very newest end of the spiral is a different color. To quote my book, that’s “the Anthropocene, a slice so tiny you could easily miss it, a fingernail sliver of rust-covered gray. If you zoomed in enough you could see minuscule buildings, cars, an airplane, all hovering precariously just at the edge. To Anna it looked as though anyone standing on that edge was about to fall off into nothing, into the timeless black that surrounded the spiral.”I fear I’ve gone into a bit of a raving tangent, but I’ll wipe the froth off my mouth, do some deep breathing, and attempt to answer your question more succinctly: I don’t feel hope for the future in the long run, either. Climate change is multi-pronged, as it gives rise not only to fires and floods but also ancient pathogens thawing out of permafrost, mosquito and tick-borne diseases moving further and further across the globe, and so many other things we simply aren’t prepared for. CD: In a past interview, you mentioned that you were “gearing for a not-so happy ending” with ‘All Our Tomorrows’ but ultimately felt like the novel needed a more hopeful ending because you didn’t want the book to “leave readers feeling like the novel was a bunch of pointless doom—we get enough of that from social media and the news.”Are you concerned that readers will misread the darkness in your work as nihilism? How do you feel about nihilism? What do you hope that readers are left with after reading ‘All Our Tomorrows?’AD: I’m not really concerned that they’ll misread the darkness in my work as nihilism. If they do, I don’t mind. I would probably mind if I branded myself as some kind of “Hope Coach,” but thankfully that is not a direction I have gone in. One of the phrases you used earlier to describe the feelings my work gave you—“claustrophobic doom”—made me smile. I love claustrophobic doom! (Writing about it, not feeling it.) But I don’t think that all of life is claustrophobic doom. Existence is multifaceted, and I choose to bring attention to the darker parts of it. They’re a lot more fun to write about, for one thing. But I also see a lot of toxic positivity everywhere. You get demonetized on social media if your content is too depressing, which admittedly makes sense from a branding point of view. But at the same time, I don’t agree with phrases like: Everything will be okay in the end, and if it’s not okay, then it’s not the end. It has its uses during a panic attack, I suppose, but on the whole that phrase never made sense to me. Like, what if someone is dying of a horrible disease? What—are you saying that things will be okay in the end because of the sweet relief of death? Well, okay, I guess that’s one way to think about it, but I don’t think that’s what that particular phrase is going for…The most popular type of nihilism seems to be that life is meaningless and has no value, nothing you do matters, and there is no point to anything (and, I can’t help reading this into it—that you may as well just shuffle yourself off this mortal coil sooner rather than later). Honestly, I think those nihilists are overthinking it. I don’t like to burden my small monkey brain with the overall meaning of life. Like, yeah, duh. Nobody knows the meaning of life. Maybe there is none. Where I don’t agree with nihilism is that life has no value. I happen to like being alive, for the most part. There is so much beauty to be found in life. There’s beauty in pursuing creative activities, in spending time with loved ones, in listening to your favorite music, in eating good food. I don’t care if it’s meaningless—I still enjoy it. And hey, maybe it’s all meaningless in the end, since we don’t live forever, and you and everyone you know will eventually die…but honestly, I think immortality would be so much worse. It’s the ephemerality of life that makes it so precious. (And, going back to the psychopathic billionaires, this is something that the most powerful people on the planet seem to have forgotten. I truly believe they can’t enjoy small pleasures anymore. They want to rule the world and live forever because they can no longer appreciate things that would make the dopamine and serotonin receptors in a normal, healthy brain light up.) Towards the end of All Our Tomorrows, it was a bit of a challenge to keep the story realistic but also have it not be totally depressing. The ending of Janet’s last chapter, as well as the ending of Gemma’s last chapter (which is literally the last sentence of the book) is probably my most clear and straightforward answer to the question that snakes through the manuscript, which is essentially “What are we supposed to do about all this anxiety, all this uncertainty, all this pain?”So, to answer your question, I want readers to come away from All Our Tomorrows with a sense of hope, with the knowledge that they can do something—even if it’s just something for themselves, and not something that saves the world, because that’s impossible—but something. Whether that’s spending time with family, or doing something creative you enjoy, or being with the person you love. Something that has meaning, and purpose, and value. And that is what makes my book incompatible with nihilism. Order 'All Our Tomorrows' here.

WHISPERING GALLERY: AN INTERVIEW WITH WILL CORDEIRO by Rebecca Gransden

May 28, 2025

Will Cordeiro’s fiction unfurls a kindly finger and beckons you to follow an uncommon path. As you tramp along seldom visited trails, your mind wanders as much as your feet. You arrive at the peculiar, the disquieting and the mysterious, without a clue how you got there or even if you want to leave. With Whispering Gallery (DUMBO Press, 2024), Cordeiro invites entry to an off-kilter world, where those who disappear into the mist entrust their steps to the uncertain ground beneath them. I spoke to the author about this curious collection. Rebecca Gransden: Some people claim that time isn’t real, that it’s just a byproduct of our mental processes—as if the mind’s cocoon prevented us from remembering the future, from knowing the past was as much alive as the present moment.What do you think of when you consider time in relation to Whispering Gallery? From when are these pieces taken? What led you to include them in the collection? Will Cordiero: First off, speaking of time, thank you for taking the time to read my book and conduct this interview. It’s always a delight to hear questions and musings from someone who’s given my work such thoughtful consideration. It means a lot, especially given how many other things, I’m sure, compete for your attention on the daily. The manipulation of temporality is one of the storyteller’s oldest tricks: to reshuffle the chronological deck, to stretch out time like a taffy-pull, to quantum leap whole centuries with a paragraph break, or to freeze the scene and rove about with the camera’s eye. But time itself is also a central subject matter of many of the pieces in Whispering Gallery. There’s a kind of time that’s the objective rate of change and then there’s a subjective sense of the onrushing flow of events as they occur in our minds, a sense which is revealed by eddies of memory, or revels in glimmering intuitions of futurity. There’s a cosmological dimension to time, as well, a question of whether time exists independent of our perceptions of it. The paradox of time is one of Kant’s antinomies, not to mention the old (the timeless?) battle between eternity and the transitory things of this world. Then there’re specific cultural senses of time, too, such as the pastoral cycle of seasons, for example. All of which is to say that these pieces often juxtapose different understandings of the temporal order. The flash form affords me brief bursts and ruptures. I try sometimes to pull the rug out from under the reader by suddenly reframing the sense of this elusive dimension. I play with both narratological tricks (how temporality gets represented in a story) and with ontological questions (what’s the nature of temporality itself). We fall in love with the world then it’s gone in a twinkling. How can you capture that mysterious, that heartbreaking flux? Every time you remember something, you change the nature of that memory—you have no access to the past, only elusive rewritings of it. Is the future fixed and fatalistic or can it be changed with our free will? Time is at the heart of so many of our most tantalizing enigmas. I’ve been writing these pieces—and others like them—for over two decades. I assembled most of my favorite oldies together and added a sprinkling of newer work, too. There were many iterations of this book over the years. Even the draft the publisher initially accepted was markedly different than the final version. Along the way, I chopped, stirred, culled, seasoned, tossed in some cayenne, simmered, let it settle. I had overlapping principles of organization. Sometimes I like the contrast between two pieces, in mood or content or style; a short piece next to a longer one, a funny punchline against a somber tale. Other times I want pieces to speak across the book, letting a theme return in a surprising manner. Maybe a piece ironically turns another on its head. There’s an infinite branching network of ways these pieces relate to each other: I didn’t want to be too heavy-handed in imposing the order. I want to allow some breathing room for the reader to find their own connections and leaps. Or even flip around and reassemble the book to their liking, skipping over some, rereading others. Which, honestly, is what many of us do anyway when we return to a collection, isn’t it? RG: Have you ever had a nickname?

(Will Cordeiro / Will Cordeiro in an anime)

WC: Funny you should ask. I’ve had nothing but nicknames. My birth certificate nominated me “Billy Joe Bush.” However, my immediate family called me “BJ” when I was young. I grew up in downstate Delaware, below the Mason-Dixon line. Not at the beach, either, which is the only area downstate anyone’s heard of. As a kid, I came up poor in the rural sticks—a land of swamps and chicken farms and trailer parks. It’s a warp-zone to the armpit of the Deep South. My mom had second thoughts. When she remarried, she had my name officially changed to “William Joseph Cordeiro.” Much fancier sounding. But I often went by “Will.” Later, in high school, that led my buddies on the track team to nickname me “Free Willy.” In college, I was dubbed “Fake” (long story). These days, I live in Mexico, so everyone who knows me here calls me “Memo,” which is the apodo for “Guillermo,” the Spanish equivalent of “William.” Constantly taking on different names probably gave me a more mutable sense of self, as if my many sobriquets were a form of cosplay, embodying different avatars and drag personas. “BJ Bush” and “Dr. Cordeiro” and “Fake” and “Memito” and the trunkful of other monikers I’ve gone by give me a malleable personality composed of aliases and fictional guises. To this day, I’m not keen to identify as any one thing: trying to locate a single locus of so-called “authenticity” seems like a mug’s game. But then, can’t most of us say, with Whitman, “I am large, I contain multitudes”? I’m not someone who’d cling to a stable narrative of self: the story of who I am changes with each retelling. Selfhood is not important. The elemental force of metamorphosis is what’s more vital. RG: Your style displays a relish for language, and an appreciation of word timbre and rhythm when it comes to construction. Do you rewrite a lot? Do you have an approach to drafting that repeats itself?WC: A few pieces—often the small ones—came close to their finished form in the first sitting. I tend to write slowly, weighing the words, waxing poetic, whittling things down even on my initial foray: I double back to adumbrate or embroider before I finish composing each sentence. Pieces emerge gradually, condensing into shape over many drafts. Yes, it is iterative: loops within loops until I’m totally loopy. On occasion, I’ll let a piece incubate in my head for some days: I work out the concept, dwell on a character, or figure out the narrative threads before hunkering down to scribble on the page. No matter, all my pieces go through countless revisions and tweaks. This collection is the fruit—the vinegar—of over two decades. I return to each piece, usually over the course of many years, fussing and fidgeting with syntax and diction, with rhythm and mouthfeel. With the grain of the voice. Even when writing stories, and not poetry, it’s very much like a musical composition where I listen for the overtones, the resonance and timbre as you deftly put it, as much as for the referential sense. Of course, with any piece I must also attend to the workaday plot, the tension, the turning points. I guard against becoming too precious, too self-indulgent, with the prose—the story’s pacing sets the momentum. After all, tempo is a crucial musical element, as well. These pieces may be miniatures, but they’re rarely minimalist in nature. I love textures and layers and lyrical excess. RG: Its antennae blinked like the cursor on a screen.Many of the pieces included in Whispering Gallery address the fundamental forces that constitute existence as we know it. Forces of nature and science that are at work while everyday life moves on. Do you view your work as having a philosophical component?WC: Sure, in the sense that many stories by, say, Calvino or Cortázar have a philosophical component. Professional academics don’t have a monopoly on philosophy. Analytic philosophy frequently has an off-putting, pedantic tone anyway. It often presumptuously arrogates the rules of the game to its own methods. Yet, for me, philosophy can also be the everyday process of reflecting, interpreting, questioning: of reconciling oneself to life. Besides, lockstep, knockdown arguments rarely compel me. Instead, I’m more intrigued by paradoxes and dilemmas. I like it when stories contain an enigma, or as Sebald says somewhere, a spectral trace of a ghost. Stories can act as thought experiments and intuition pumps. They help us deliberate ethical situations; they provoke us to imagine stranger, more far-ranging metaphysical possibilities; they sharpen our epistemic knives, showing us ways our equipment might be limited or faulty. My own thinking is so often unsettled. To dwell on any idea begins to disorient me. The hermeneutical circle’s not a smooth wheel—it’s wobbly and oblong, punctured by disruptions and bafflements and afflictions of doubt. My own elliptical insights can swing from sudden revelations to ignominious defeats. In many cases, it’s this inner adventure that I portray in my characters; that I want to recreate in my readers. I try to use tools like defamiliarization, humor, skepticism, and irony to move my readers, to incite new recognitions, to instigate a playful tension between differing values or perspectives. I don’t aim for any foregone conclusion. I hope my work acts as an invitation to contemplate nuances and ambiguities, at times holding contradictions in abeyance. Perhaps my work can cultivate a richer sense of “reality,” whatever that means. Or perhaps it only impels a reaching-forth amid vast ranges of uncertainty, a bewitchment of one’s curiosity. Stories can cast enduring spells. Don’t most of us want stories that can make the humdrum world thrum once more with the undercurrents of its secret magic? Plato and Aristotle both believed philosophy begins in wonder, which is the same place most of my stories start from, too. RG: Everyone had gone to sleep in the city. I wondered if the buildings might vanish—if they were only the collective apparition of the inhabitants. It was dark out my window. Only pinpoints of glister winkled in doubt: starburst, lamp-glow, hallucinations. The streets were empty. Wherever the people were, they must be dreaming of something else.“Lucid Moment” makes reference to hallucination and dream logic. What part do altered states play in Whispering Gallery?WC: I enjoy those moments when reading can induce a tripped-out and ecstatic wakefulness. Imagining a story is a bit like concocting an illusion: it’s knowingly dwelling within this hallucinatory space you’ve projected. Visionary flashes of perception don’t need to come from a mind on drugs or dreams or yogic navel-gazing or religious epiphany or tantric sex or Neuralink—though all those scenarios can be interesting. Merely thinking can be a kind of drug almost, generating a giddying habitation of umbras and insights; and thinking (one might think) is an activity that’s intrinsic to minds. To talk about “altered states,” you’d need a baseline of what a normal state of consciousness would be, right? To me, consciousness itself has a magical quality to it. If my work appears to explore altered states of consciousness, perhaps it’s a way to goad readers into recognizing the spooky inner workings of their own apprehensions; a method to defamiliarize and thus reenchant the world. If milk is the mildest of liquors, as Carlyle wrote in Sartor Resartus, maybe meditation—whether lovelorn or logical, lucid or ludicrous—is one of the strongest. RG: “A New Realism” raises some interesting questions on deception, authenticity, artistic practice and the right to privacy. What is your approach to the promotion of your work? How important is privacy to you?WC: I’m not temperamentally a self-promoter. No shyster barking and jiving, I. No desire to be an influencer, a marketeer, a celebrity shilling their own brand. Power, money, fame: none of ‘em’s my bag. Of course, I’ll exercise my power by voting; I want enough money to have the leisure time to read and write, to travel a bit, to afford healthcare; I’m not such a recluse holed up in my room that I won’t saunter out to give a talk once in a blue moon or respond to interview questions such as you’ve been so kind to ask. There’s no real danger of my becoming renowned or popular, in this lifetime anyway—it’s not like I need to disguise myself in sunglasses and a big floppy hat on the street or use assumed names at hotels to avoid the paparazzi. I don’t need to retreat from all media appearances to go plunk myself in a cave in New Hampshire. As if. But maybe I do live in a cave, sort of. And not just a Platonic one, like we all do. I mean—I’m not on any social media. Isn’t that pretty hermitic, hermetic even, in this age? I just find it a huge brain-rotting time-suck which is disastrous for one’s mental health as well as the health of the body politic. So, I’m also not famous to ten people, either, the way a lot of folks are these days. It's not that I’m private per se. But I tend to resist drawing connections between fiction and real life, as your question does here, for example. I doubt there’s some childhood trauma that’s fed my writing or some ghastly secret I’ve been hiding that impels me to tell stories. Whatever tales I spin out about myself probably obfuscate as much as they illuminate anyhow; I spin them out because it’s my nature to unspool these spider-spit writerly threads. One story hides behind another. Looking for the root of a text in an author’s supposed lived experience is an ubiquitous move in literary culture nowadays since audiences want to know about the author, hear anecdotes, feel connected to the source as if they could thereby come into contact with the work’s aura. Or maybe it’s just that authors are reduced to media “personalities” since often audiences haven’t read—don’t want to read the work. I’ve met a fair number of authors, and the majority are just regular Uncle Jim-bobs or Aunt Mays; some are a little dopey or true snoozefests. Others are snooty academics or anxious fusspots or doddering busybodies. They’re a scrapheap’s worth of skipjack jackanapes spooning boondoggerel. Myself perhaps included. (I’m ambivalent—as I am about most things). Authors come in all types. But a literary work distills an author’s ideas into their wittiest and most vivacious expression, if the author’s any good. Why should it surprise us, then, to feel disappointed when the incarnate human being can’t live up to those expectations? “I’m Nobody! Who are you? / Are you—Nobody—too?” as Dickinson said. Who wants to end up “public—like a frog—”? I’d rather be the prince of my own solitary room, voyaging around my head. Sometimes I wonder if writing is a ceremony converting the stuff of our language—what could be more public? common as air—into the fabric of our interiority; and simultaneously airing our most inward-turning thoughts into chirps and croaks. RG: Looking back now, years later, the whole city seems an underworld, an air of cinders, foreshadowing its own downfall. A field of cenotaphs. Long rows of ruins frozen into schlag and marzipan. Pediments like dinosaurs. Everything half buried under the weight of what it once had been.Frequently Whispering Gallery contains a tension between the immediacy of your descriptions and a more contemplative framing. Are there pieces that stand out to you as being a memorable experience to write?WC: In what sense can you say that you will your thoughts? Thoughts, the better ones at any rate, often come unbidden. We do not think our thoughts; our thoughts think us. Writing usually occurs when I’m pinballed around by powers almost outside myself. The sounds entangle their own eerie melodies; ideas stray paths of errant logic; characters chatter in voices not my own. It’s not that I throw my voice—rather, I’m thrown by the voices. They ventriloquize me. Where these thoughts and voices come from remains something of a mystery. You harvest them from reading and experience, perhaps. They are what we vaguely term “imagination.” You can make yourself receptive to them, a quivering electrometer that picks up the subtle variations in magnetic charges that coruscate the atmosphere. But who has the muse on speed dial? No matter how much you plan, there’s always an element of spontaneity. The voices can’t be summoned at will. The best you can do is prepare and practice, listen and long for them to return. Afterward, the editorial and critical parts of your brain apply the scalpel to shape this material into a more handsomely polished, more sure-handed form. My descriptions often try to shed light on earthly flora and fauna, figuring the minutiae of landscapes and the immensity of dreamscapes, thereby gesturing toward how invariably blind we are to the larger cosmos around us. They juxtapose scales and temporalities, points of view and paradigms. Still, we don’t call a stone blind. As Heidegger says, blindness afflicts only those beings who are capable of seeing. To ask whether someone is blind foreshadows—shadows forth—the very possibility of their having the nature of a being with sight. I try to trace the contours of both our perceptions and our presumptions. I attempt to look closer at the things around us while reframing the background concepts that inform how we see those things. It’s this dual, this dialectical unfolding that unveils how the seemingly immediate experiences of our own body and environment are, nevertheless, already mediated by our mental and corporeal equipment. To see anew is to recognize that one has, all along, been blind to the world; and maybe thereby to recognize that this new sight could, upon another disclosure, reveal itself as a type of blindness, too. There may be no end to revelation.RG: For “Sadness” the world you create sees an air of melancholy descend. If eras are defined by a prevailing mood, what do you view as the tone of these times we are living through?WC: Chaos? Malignant asociality? A giddy, trollish nihilism? It’s hard to understand the era we’re living through. These, unfortunately, are interesting times. In my youth, reading history with the aid of hindsight, I’d often wonder how people could be taken in by the Know-Nothing Party or William Jennings Bryant’s “Cross of Gold Speech” or other such flights of demagoguery. Today, living through a tumultuous period of history, I’m equally baffled by how a good chunk of the populace can be hoodwinked by criminals and charlatans. Confidence men worry great pearls of falsehood upon tiny grains of truth. Then again, there’s plenty of born suckers. The broligarchs can manipulate people in nearly clandestine ways: think how innocuously an app might change its terms and conditions, for example, or the way algorithms spread misleading stories much faster than true ones. Lots of folks are upset, at what or whom they’re often not sure, and that very anger is then redirected to their disadvantage. The ethos of “move fast and break things” has become a goal unto itself, writ large. Democracy depends on an infrastructure of news sources, public forums, civic organizations, educational institutions. These are being atomized, privatized, or wiped out so that the robber barons can have unregulated control to exploit and extract wealth. Most people are too preoccupied with their everyday drudgery to pay attention, read, participate in their communities, or make art; this leads to a vicious cycle where the oligarchs can turn the screws on a disengaged and uninformed citizenry, beating you down and fleecing you even more. Everything’s a distraction from something worse on the horizon. Doomscrolling might be a good metaphor for how the system uses our own anxiety against us: we can’t help rubbernecking the wreckage that our tech addiction itself has caused. To bicker about the problem only fuels the flames—and flame wars—higher. We’re too burnt out to care that a handful of folks are burning it all down. Climate change isn’t happening fast enough for some folks, I guess. We’re accelerating toward a corpocratic state, a zombified corpse state, the necrotic triage of vulture capitalism: escalating scarcity for the many, overwhelming plenitude for a vanishingly few. But people just keep going about their business because business is what people do. RG: What was your conceptual framework for “The Lost Gospel of Caiaphas”?WC: I think the initial inspiration was reading excerpts from some of the Gnostic Gospels and chapters from Elaine Pagel’s book of that name. The Nag Hammadi manuscripts were discovered in 1945 and only made readily available to the public in the 1980s. They were Coptic papyri discovered by an Egyptian farmer in a sealed jar with a likely provenance of the 4th century—and their impact was revolutionary, upending the scholarly understanding of the historical foundations of Christianity.Too, rewriting the gospel narrative is a veritable subgenre unto itself—novelistic examples include The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (Saramago); The Gospel According to the Son (Mailer); Figuras de la Pasión del Señor (Gabriel Miró); and King Jesus (Graves). Barabbas by Pär Lagerkvist is one I recommend. Siddhartha by Hesse or Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra do something similar in other religious traditions. Apocrypha and heretical accounts have their appeal. They are the marginalized and forgotten stories that were refused a place in the church, that is, the dominant version of the church we know now—the one which survived from competing sects and schisms that cropped up as early as St. Paul (or one might claim, as early as the disciples themselves). At a time when revisionary histories (on the left) and “alternative facts” (on the right) are popular, when everyone questions the official version of a tale, when nobody is satisfied with a univocal canon, it makes sense that apocrypha would have its allure. Besides, the canonical gospels themselves are four wildly different stories that vary both in style and substance. There’s already a pluralism built-in to the structure of the gospels. Their gaps and contradictions gesture that no single version is definitive. Co-opting a gospel-like narrative gave me the freedom to appropriate a simple yet vatic tone to write parables, proverbs, and epigrams—to make mystical pronouncements: it’s a type of writing that, while I find it has a uniquely enthralling energy, can be very difficult to pull off in contemporary English without some such framing device. One can’t make oracular, rhapsodic pronouncements in propria persona. Yet, once that framework was established, I felt disinhibited and could make witty underhanded comments against authority, tell stories that took on different significations to different audiences, and challenge the reader’s habitual understanding of traditional values—all things that the gospel narratives (whether apocryphal or not) are often so good at, though we sometimes can’t appreciate their weirdness and originality. RG: There’s an erotic charge around these objects: they’re ghosts leftover from being handled. Things you would find in any mall, swap meet, flea market are transfigured at every turn. A remote control appears moon-beamed in from science fiction. A salad fork looks like a cannibal’s keepsake.The ordinary is given fresh perspective in “The Museum of Ordinary Objects”. As well as raising questions on the meaning attached to such objects, the story invites speculation on the nature of viewing in itself. How do you view this story? If you were curator of your own Museum of Ordinary Objects, what would you exhibit?WC: I went gallery-hopping during ART WKD GDL last Saturday. In one gallery, you couldn’t tell where the curated displays ended and the unfinished work and raw materials of the studio began. There was a Xeroxed paper affixed to the wall with blue painter’s tape next to the painting the image on the paper was of. Was this just the haphazard environment of a working artist’s studio or was it some kind of self-referential meta-conceptual hijinks? I liked not being able to tell. Across town, in a different gallery, I entered an empty room. My partner was looking at a prominent pile of debris exhibited at the center of the floor: multicolored paint flakes and assortments of concrete gobs were framed against the checkerboard tiles. This one was my favorite piece so far, I thought: the paint could be house paint from the wall; the dust could be the crumbling wall itself. It made me feel the transitory nature of the space—the visceral, immolating decadence of ruin porn. The whole site-specific exhibit up to this point had been about repurposing stretched canvas and frames and painterly materials in a sculptural, almost environmental way, that referenced the architecture of the gallery itself (it was a house designed by Luis Barragán). Barragán’s architecture transforms spaces into planes of color; the artist, by contrast, transformed planes of color into spaces. While we were rubbing our chins, shrewdly observing the piece, along comes the gallerist with a broom—sorry, she says, we’re still getting everything settled. In certain frames of mind, I inhabit a world where any object can become a Duchampian readymade. I’m reawakened to its aesthetic dimensions, its anthropological significance, the Barthesian mythologies it extrudes. I observe an item’s singular quiddity; its multivalent symbolism. Every point is the origin of the universe; every node stands at a crux reticulating it into the warp and weft of meaning. Perhaps I’m low-key infected by the disorienting palpitations in the presence of beauty, a condition known as Stendhal syndrome. Art has a way to induce a manic state in me at times. Or maybe it’s the mania of the gorging eye or florid mind that imbues an object, any object really, with the same arresting qualities we seek out when we view great works of art. It’s the opposite of museum fatigue. Looking can become a frenzy that feeds upon itself, rendering the dizzying optics of scopophilia. Any ol’ junk—gum-wrapper, paperclip, tissue box—begins to iffily shimmer and zing with ineffable brindles of import. It’s not the object that matters, it’s one’s susceptibility to cozy to it with a rigorous vulnerability. The process of being whelmed in the sheer presence of something, looking deeply at it, prompts a scatterbrained brainstorming, an ornery—an incorrigible—associational vigor where a thing becomes at once dis-cultured, relieved of its habitual connotations, and yet enwoven into countless symbolic networks. RG: “Masquerade Store” presents an ordinary town caught in the spell of a business that sells masks, identities. A deep sense of unease unfolds as the town’s nature is changed. How do you approach high concept stories? Where does the weird come into play in your fiction?WC: “Masquerade Store” was a later piece I added to the collection. I’m still uncertain if it really captures the full sense of unease I was going for. I’m glad to hear you think it works. During the writing process, there were a few adjustments that helped. I created two turning points in the story. What at first seems like a description from an impersonal third-person narrator about the facts of a garden-variety, deteriorating town (though it is “our town”) emerges as a fulsomely first-person voice about midway in the story, where you realize the narrator is implicated and complicit in the events being described. This shift of perspective, of narratorial vantage, relocates the stakes involved and may also undermine the seeming objectivity of the first part with hints of unreliability. What once appeared to be a sociological description of a town retrospectively turns into a fucked-up person’s defense tactic to distance himself from his problems by using a more clinical, arm’s-length tone. Another turning point occurs near the end, when the narrator suddenly gazes off into the distance, using a collective voice, “we.” The yearning both to watch banal superhero movies and to dress-up as some powerful if exoticized “other” is exposed, at the end, to be predicated upon inchoate heroic longings. A grandeur that’s glimpsed in sunlit oracles and sublime flames but cannot be realized, a longing that ultimately casts each person further adrift in their lonely quest to circumvent the self as much as to find it. Yet such drift, we might say, is what unites the citizens of the town as a civic body, too. Who one is must be projected and absorbed from those around one in a hall of mirrors; yet, doing so requires a motive power of self-transformation. Heck, rereading the story now, I realize that the third-person voice quite quickly begins ventriloquizing in the second person, using “you” in a way that is ambiguous between meaning an anonymous, impersonal “one,” calling out the real reader, or addressing a particular person offstage. This is even before the first-person voice fully emerges. These peculiar gear-shifts between points-of-view and subtle changes in tone help convey the breakdown of coherent identities the town is undergoing, whether these devices are explicitly noticed or not when you’re reading. Still, each story is different: a lot of my writing is a search not only for a compelling plotline, but for the adequate technical means to have a story express some conceptual dilemma, oftentimes one that’s a bit abstruse, so that it’s uncanny, disquieting, and affecting for the reader. RG: The collection was released by DUMBO Press on 31st October 2024—Halloween. For stories where the veil between worlds of strangeness is thin, this is a wildly appropriate date to present the book to the world. How have you found the experience of releasing the book? What is next for you?WC: Yes, Halloween felt like the perfect release date for this collection! These are eerie, metaphysical tales influenced by the likes of magical realism and Gothic and absurdism and offbeat speculative fiction. I’m happy to see Whispering Gallery launched into the world. To hold the tangible book validates the years of effort—the writing feels more real than when it consisted of dozens of little stories trapped on my computer or floating around online lit journals, many of which are now defunct. It’s gratifying when I gain readers. I’m very thankful DUMBO picked it up. At the end of the day, though, this book’s an odd duckling published by a small press. It won’t be everybody’s jam. That’s ok. My hope is that a handful of readers will really crush on it. Maybe a book goes in search of its true readers. Whatever others think, I write because I enjoy the process. The grind of sitting down to peck at my keyboard can feel ecstatic and ravishing. I’ll give two-three readings or talks, a couple interviews (like this one), maybe get a review or two if I’m lucky. That’s the nature of small press publishing. Small presses provide a space for such queer birds to take flight or just waddle around—for books to pursue their own ideals, and authors their own evolution, largely outside the pressures of the mainstream marketplace. I have several other projects on tap in different stages of completion. I’m currently sending out my second poetry manuscript while tidying up poems for another. I’ve been slowly accumulating essays for a nonfiction book, mostly dealing with art and travel, which has also taken decades to compose. And I just started a notebook to jot down plot points and outlines as I ideate my first novel. I write plays and operas on the side, too: I just wrapped up a new three-act opera that was produced last year, which could use a few rewrites maybe. But my most concerted task currently is completing a textbook, The New Foundations of Creative Writing, which I’m writing with my long-time collaborator, Lawrence Lenhart. Our pitch just got a contract offer from Bloomsbury. We started this project from all the material we couldn’t fit in the first textbook we wrote together, Experimental Writing, which came out from Bloomsbury last year. Most introductory textbooks in the discipline feel twenty years out of date. It’s a very contentious time in the field—there’s a lot of debates and changes taking place in the discourse, both within academia and the industry; that will make this book quite a challenge. Or maybe that’s why we’re the only ones foolish enough to attempt such a preposterous errand?

SIGNAL ISSUES AND FUZZY SNIPPETS: AN INTERVIEW WITH CHASE GRIFFIN by Rebecca Gransden

May 13, 2025

Chase Griffin’s alchemical style continues with Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace (Corona/Samizdat, 2026). At once a fanciful record of an unfathomable mind and experiment in merriment, the book is unabashed with its lingual adventurousness. When life gives you strange frequencies it’s time to whistle your own tune. Griffin is a psychedelic jester, and, as is common to that type, also the smartest guy in the room. I spoke to him about the book. Rebecca Gransden: Where there are gaps in this text, there are gaps in my life. I was only able to write this introductory material after an extended break from text of all types. They say the only way to get out of a black hole is to have never gone into it. While I don’t recommend going any further into this one, it’s already too late for you. -Roy Christopher, 2024 What’s the deal? When and how was this written and translated? Where does Roy Christopher fit into all this? Chase Griffin: Zoidoid was written in an alternate 1980’s by an alternate-me. And Roy is an alternate-Roy. And Roy has half-translated (half-translated because he suffered some Lovecraftian-madness while translating and he couldn't finish) Zoidoid from a fake future language (alternate-me is also a philologist) into English. Thanks for writing that intro, alternate-Roy!RG: How long did it take to write Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace? Did time pass fast or slow or in-between?CG: It took a year to write Zoidoid in my head. I was working as an overnight stocking clerk at the time. And it took a couple nights to let the whole thing pour out of my head onto the page. The year was long because overnight jobs are fucking awful. The two days passed slowly, but that was a pleasant slowness. I think one of the greatest feelings in the world is being in the midst of that fabulous kind of writer's schizophrenia when time stands still and the alien worm voice guides the pen.RG: It’s been a while since I've written in commonplace. I shouldn't be writing so sporadically in here... the way I’ve been writing in here for the past twenty or so units. I am realizing now that I should be much more diligent. What are your aims regarding language and style for the book? Any intentions regarding world building or backstory?CG: Context: Peter has this notebook filled with his archeologist, archivist parents' writings on the past (our present) and the language of the past and how the language might be able to unlock the secrets of the mind control device permeating all. Further context: So the commonplace book referenced is both Peter's diary (the back half of the fictional notebook which makes up the whole of Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace) and an archeologist book (the front half of the fictional notebook which we do not get to read).I went with this constrained epistolary style because that style best suits a story about translation and a world that makes unreliable narrators of its population.RG: Believe me, I wish I could turn off fresh emphasis. I don't want this trouble. I wish to be a googly-eyed wacko normie schmuck just like everyone else. Who needs this kind of stress? What would you like to emphasise?CG: I don’t know. Having a faulty, sparky monkey brain is great. There’s nothing wrong with the mass madness that is humanity. Because none of it matters. I love my madness. It’s my superpower. And only the outwardly mad ones are the sane ones. We’re all flawed and terrible because we’re gross animals. But who cares. Let’s all forgive each other for being born dumb animals. The sooner we get over this mass psychological determinism we are all bound to, then the sooner the big, dumb Doubt can begin, and then we can all accept it, and then we can go ahead and finally begin gently, cautiously being big, dumb monkeys attempting to not be big, dumb monkeys (which I think involves a lot of mass inaction and quiet and staving off entropy and the elders starving for the young (my modest proposal)). Maybe it is written that we will stop doing things for long periods of time. Maybe it is written that we will finally give up and realize we’re not good or better because we’ve done nothing bad. We’re just lucky. The circumstances we were born into gave us ourselves. We did nothing to earn a self. Not one of us has free will. So these words don’t matter. Nothing matters.God, I’m such a drama queen.Ask me tomorrow. I’ll emphasize a belief in something tomorrow.RG: Why am I still eating this dip? What is the best dip? What is your favourite dip? (Not necessarily connected).CG: Guacamole. Guacamole.RG: Have you ever smirked momentously?CG: Sure. After a good fart. RG: I believe I'm having a strange reaction to death. Makes sense. I often have strange reactions to many things.Have you ever had a strange reaction? Do you aim to establish a particular type of reaction in those who read your work?CG: Sure, I have strange reactions all the time. Life is weird and I have a faulty, sparky monkey brain. And no, not really. I'm not looking to establish a particular reaction in readers. I'm looking for readers who are down to have fun with the text.RG: I think I will crack open my briefing case. Today's setting will be archoniff sider and maybe it will help with my damn sass. What is the importance of sass to Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace? Where does sass begin and end? How much is too much? Does sass have an objective measure?CG: It might not be sass. Sass might be a random word that Roy chose when he was translating. And I don't know about the beginning and ending of sass. Maybe there is no beginning or ending. Yes, I feel like sass has an objective measure and its measuring instrument is an oversized spanner covered in purposeless springs and gears. RG: Please introduce Bippy.CG: Bippy is Peter's dead mom’s cat. This prissy furball is the hero of the book and the best character I have ever written.RG: I’ve written too much and I am going to become an unshakable thing. How horrid!Have you encountered any horrid unshakeable things, either in the writing of the book or generally?CG: Surely. All the time. I encounter horrid unshakable things all the time. I live in a densely populated village. How could I not encounter horrid unshakable things? Don’t read the local paper, by the way. But what am I to do? Nothing really. I see it all as character building. I have to be like the Buddha Or maybe not. People suffer so much more than me, so why shouldn’t I suffer some too? I just got lucky because I wasn't born into terrible circumstances. No one earned anything. How horrid! RG: The book features song lyrics. Are there melodies behind these lyrics or do they exist solely on the page?CG: I have melodies for them, but the reader can make up whatever melody they want.RG: What significance does music have to Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace? Do any bands or albums share common elements?CG: Music plays a big role in prosody, and prosody is very important to me.Music is always on my mindMusic prompted the writing of Zoidoid. One night at work, while I was listening to “Doctor Worm” by They Might Be Giants, I came up with the basic outline for Zoidoid.Also, Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace and its fraternal twin, Satanic Panic & the Very Special Episodes (they will be published together as The Ampersand Collection on Corona Samizdat), are like the twin Guided By Voices albums Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes. The common elements are the signal issues and equipment blockage. The books and the albums have these fun messages to send you but the low studio quality and signal issues (mostly due on both parts to limited budget) only allow fuzzy snippets of the messages to get through. And, of course, this fuzzy snippet-ness (this constraint technique) is all a part of the charm.RG: I am the only untranslatable person in the world. There's no one here who can decipher the whispered gibberish. Does your writing demand comprehension? What is lost or found in translation?CG: My writing doesn't demand comprehension. All that matters is the emotion and the emphasis, the incomprehensible human-ness (the faulty, sparky monkey-ness), poking through the rigmarole-membrane of the literal and figurative institutions. My works are more like fantasy and fairy tales (which don't require explanations for their motions) than science fiction (which is like a fairy tale giving excuses for its behavior).RG: How do you define New and Old?CG: Pre-old is our time. Old is the glorious golden civilization that arose from the ashes of our time. New is the oppressive society that followed the downfall of Old.RG: Does Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace have anything to say when it comes to politics and current affairs?CG: Not sure. I don't think there's much to say. We're all actor-bodies of the leviathan-theatre and all political conversation is a big script. It's all catechisms. Even what I just wrote. And also with you! Gesundheit!But maybe the book is asking about obscurantisms and mesmerisms. Are we searching too hard or too little for obscurantisms and mesmerisms? Are we too paranoid or not paranoid enough? Should we be putting our energy elsewhere? Is this, the searching and obsessing over possible hidden things, a design—like a figurative Air Loom? RG: How do you approach the use of signs and symbolism in your work?CG: Character and story always come first. The conceptual materials are handed to me by the characters and the story. Then comes the welding torch.Going back to music, this is how a lot of the great concept albums were made. Fellowshipping equals motif discovery.RG: Onomatopoeia—what are its limits?CG: What are the patience-limits of your ideal reader?RG: How would you advise someone approach reading this book? Any particular demeanour or method of engagement that would enhance the experience?CG: My books like to be read aloud (although many readers have told me they prefer to read them silently)—in the same way Shakespeare is best ingested when read aloud aloud. Not saying I’m Shakespeare by the way. I need to add way more dick and fart jokes to my work if I want to be Shakespeare. With something like Hamlet, even if you don't understand the language and the cultural references, if you read it aloud you understand the emotions and the emphasis. And maybe that kind of understanding is more important than direct understanding, which is an understanding that always ends up getting folded into the flux.Also, use whatever pronunciation you want for my made-up words. And then stick to whatever pronunciation you choose.RG: I looked back to Shea to make sure he wasn't examining my facial expressions too closely. What facial expression best expresses what Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace is trying to express?CG: How about that fun face Johnny Cash is making in that famous picture of him flipping the bird?RG: Do you hate computers?CG: Meh. I'm pretty indifferent. What even is a computer? Are they terrible for the earth, like air conditioners and cars?RG: Believe me. I didn't want to trust him. I didn't want to set aside my urge to stomp his brains in. I didn't want to not hate him, the fucking mentor fuck. But I submitted, and I set it all aside.Have you ever trusted someone to be your mentor? If so, what influence have they had upon Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace?CG: No. No mentors.There have been Lots of cool old guys and gals in my life though and they’ve given me really good advice. Please excuse this aside. The most trustworthy old people I ever met was this hippie-pirate couple who owned this fantastic used bookstore and junkshop called The Memex. I spent most of my youth sitting in the back of their store reading old copies of Mondo2000, the Illuminatus Trilogy, Rocco Atleby novels, Ursula Le Guin, and the Whole Earth Catelog.RG: Do you ever get the feeling of brain growth caused by reading? In a physical, oh jeez, something changed and I’m not sure in what way?CG: Yeah, definitely. I feel squirming sometimes. And I hear a little voice. The voice says things like, “It's just you and me, buddy,” and, “More guacamole, please.”RG: What portmanteaus, neologisms and/or spoonerisms do you like? Are there literary devices you would NEVER use, because they are lame? Conversely, are there literary devices you consider underused, so would like to advocate for?CG: I like whatever looks good on the page. And, I don't like to knock stuff. Because I wouldn't want to indirectly knock a fellow writer’s style. Everybody is allowed to do their thang. And, I don't know what's overused or underused. I use devices when the need arises.RG: Is there a chance that Bippy could have her own spinoff universe?CG: Yes, absolutely. Bippy deserves ten books.RG: Which renowned philosophers would read and appreciate Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace?CG: He’s a TV character, but I feel like Bernard Black might like my book. I had his voice in my head, impatiently making up words and saying sassy lil deconstructions, when I was writing this one.Although, Bernard would probably open my book, drop a piece of jammy toast in it, make a face at his mess, and then toss the book-jam-toast monstrosity at an annoying customer.RG: How is information transferred via Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace?CG: Information is transferred through the air via the Air Loom.Spoiler alert: The Air Loom was built during the golden civilization when we finally figured out the horrible truth. We built the Air Loom in order to hide the Lovecraftian revelation from ourselves.RG: Have you ever kept a journal, diary, or log?CG: Yeah, I keep a journal. I mostly write about the cute things my kids do. I keep a commonplace book too. That’s where I do all of my story and character mining.RG: What is your dream for the book?CG: My dream is for it to get folded into the book cocooning all of my current books, SCHLEMIEL GAUCHO, which is about this one-man Brothers Grimm who is collecting postmodern fairy tales (my books) before they are swallowed up by the flux and incorporated in the fold.RG: Where is Peter Zoidoid and where is Chase Griffin?CG: Peter Zoidoid is in the book writing with the slime-pen filled and Chase Griffin is in Tampa writing this answer.

DO THESE BOOKS MAKE ME LOOK WEIRD?: JACK SKELLEY RECOMMENDS

April 15, 2025

Madison Murray, My Gaping Masshole (Self-published, 2025)A tart is born: Announcing Madison Murray’s fiction, poems, collages. The collection is replete with references to Boston (especially North Shore, Massachusetts). You know, Dunkin Donuts, clam chowdah, the Red Sox Big Green Monstah, Paul Revere, etc. My Gaping Masshole is one unholy, whole, big-ass jam on the concept. Murray’s lewd charm stains every page. My fave parts are Murray’s stories, with real laff-per-paragraph settings, characters, dialog. Of today’s several new writers who are also sex workers (or sex worker-adjacent), Murray is the raunchiest… and funniest.The geo-specificity reminds me of this essential William Blake riff from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive. And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity.” (Italics mine.) Not “genius” in the sense of Einstein (although that fits). But in the sense of the human imagination embodied in every locale. Every writer does this to a degree. I know I never cease the love-hate relationship with the Los Angeles of my mind. Of course, in 2025 we’re deep in tawdry, post-post-post irony mode, so Murray mocks and embodies a debased “mental deity” of Massachusetts with the obsessive affection of a dirty completist. Book vloggersThere’s a world of yackers on YouTube. Most stick to reviewing large-press fiction. But keener vloggers venture into independent presses and niche genres. Here are some trends. Best vloggers: Chanel Chapters (pictured) reviews from Melbourne with access to at least two excellent indie stores (Metropolis Bookshop and World Food Books) and local libraries. Chapters’ open mind, plunging cleavage, and sometimes potty mouth recently incited threats by YouTube to demonetize her! (All part of the global megamedia crackdown, folks.) But this reviewer continues to rock with wit, humor, urban tours and delicious fits. YouTube has not exactified what rules were broken, so WTF else is she supposed to do? Go, Chanel!Ana Wallace Johnson has accrued 68K subscribers not only for reviews (personal takes but I haven’t disagreed yet), but also for travel vids and glimpses of her low-budget/highbrow NYC lifestyle and tastes. What sets Wallace apart is a droll demeanor. Come for the laffs, stay for the books: Wallace’s taste ventures past mass-market narrative toward non-fiction, drama, used bookstores, and forays into independent presses. The Wallace wit includes impromptu raps where she observes her word-choices in the act—self-mocking/self-correcting. Her Sally Rooney review had me howling. Honorable mention: Chris Via on Leaf by Leaf has total cred and writes legit lit crit. Trend Watch: “Weird lit” is a big vlogger term, but notice how often it is equated with horror, a mega genre that occasionally edges into artful lit-fic via voices such as Elle Nash and Charlene Elsby. Also, is Shirley Jackson really “horror”? Vloggers sometimes confuse “weird women lit” with the “sad-girl novel” and straight-up narrative. Like, are Ottessa Moshfegh and Sally Rooney actually “weird”? This adjective is abused! Editor’s advice: Avoid non-descript, general terms: thing, stuff, good, bad, really, something and, yes, weird… unless that is indeed the best word. Emmalea Russo, Vivienne (Skyhorse, 2024) Resonant novel fashions a (fictional) update of (actual) deceased artist Hans Belmer’s long-surviving (fictional) lover Vivienne Volker. Vivienne may or may not have been involved in the long-ago suicide of Belmer’s other (fictional) lover Wilma Lang, who may or may not suggest (actual) writer and artist Unica Zürn. But never mind all that. It’s just intrigue to power the contemporary plot and stylistic gymnastics. These feats include revolving POVs and entire chapters rendered in YouTube comments. Themes include shady shenanigans of the art-world “industry”; the hypocrisies of cancel culture (the author was a prey of same); and cross-generational sex/romance offered nonchalantly. The book may haunt you months after reading if you encounter Belmer and Zürn. Jessamyn Violet, Venice Peach (Maudlin House, 2025)Uh-oh! A TikTok time bomb has burst the Superdoom Portal. A vengeful AI president punishes all citizens, sex bots and media stars. Nothing, it seems, can stop the haywire L.A Hellscape seen by twisted visionary Jessamyn Violet. Inside dope: The author wrote this dystopian funhouse during the first Trump preziduncy. She learned Maudlin House would publish it just as Trump was re-elected last year. This gives the story’s vindictive President TBD 3000 – and all its characters and scenes – the quality of a Cassandra curse. Except that it’s farcically funny. David Trinidad, Hollywood Cemetery (Green Linden, 2025)Heaven’s stars are quasi-immortal, while Hollywood’s are fated to fade. Graciously, Trinidad’s page-sized eulogies grant a couple dozen bit players one last flash-in-the-pan. The actors tell their own stories, but Trinidad’s voice floats above them, an angel wearing shades, bestowing epitaphs, footnotes and the harsh irony of glimmer and glamour doomed in a company town. (Capitalism, like time, is cruel.) The lives of these players (including one dog, Toto) end prosaically. Still, they emit elegantly tangy poetry, as does this book. Elaine Equi and Jerome Sala, Double Feature (Insurance Editions, 2024). Elaine Equi and Jerome Sala are poetry’s power couple. For decades they have lived, loved, performed and blown minds together. Equi with amusement, bemusement and rough-to-smooth edges that engage the senses, then the mind. Sala with knee-slap spit-takes on commodity culture borne from a career in advertising. Both are premiere pop poets, descending from the New York School of tender accessibility. Despite their years together, this is, to my knowledge, their first collaborative book. It’s two chapbooks in one… a bargain! Diva Corp USA, volume 2, zineI do not understand the art industry, especially how its monetary mechanics so unsustainably skew to collectors and a handful of “art stars.” This tracks roughly with music and publishing. But the art world erects a pantheon of demi-gods in acropolis museums: The new Los Angeles County Museum of Art is a $ billion palace of excess by “starchitect” Peter Zumthor. Hilde Lynn Helphenstein’s Diva Corp essay “Stop Crying Over Spilled Inauthenticity” says this “increasingly byzantine” world strains connections between genuine artists/art lovers and its buyers/institutions. And, as if embarrassed by fancy servicing of the 1%, it bathes in identity politics. Is this what makes it prone to serial cancelling even while its elites roam free, hypocritically? Other Diva Corp contributions include stories, poems and reproductions…all on newsprint. It performs its public service in mock mystery. I attended the launch event. The editors/publishers were MIA. They are anonymous. Issues were placed by the restroom toilets. I couldn’t find one. But they did print my theoretical manifesto “Das NeuroKapital.” Dunce Codex, anthologyPubbed by editor Roo, this is two collections: prose and poetry. Impressive design and voices. Gobs of lit-besties young and not so young: Benjamin Weissman, Dennis Cooper, Frank Demma, Gabby Sones, Lily Lady, Erin Satterthwaite, Riley Mac, Meat Stevens, Derek Fisher, Manuel Chavarria, Sophie Appel, Selva Imran, Priscilla Jasmine, Brittany Menjivar, Clarke e. Andros, Pedro Minet, Alistair McCartney, Thomas Moore, Eileen Myles, Jacqui Alpine, Charalampos Tzanakis, Amy Gerstler, Jimmy Vega. Plus many worthy peeps new to me. Freakishly, my name pops up in two unrelated pieces and in Roo’s intro! Order from duncecodex@protonmail.com. Car Crash Collective, anthologyLike Dunce Codex above, this robust volume is proof of scene solidity. It evolved from the same-named reading series by lit Angelenas Erin Satterthwaite and Brittany Menjivar. (Events in L.A., New York, Berlin and…) There’s no index, so rather than skip to a name, you open and read. Rewarding prose results include Zoey Greenwald, Kate Durbin, Chris Molnar, Taylor Lewandowski, Alec Niedenthal, Sarah Velk and Belinda Cai. Beau Geste, 2nd Issue, zineHere’s a multi-media mind fuck: A magazine that is also an oversized artwork is also documentation of a recent Los Angeles performance. Curated by Jordan Rountree, the texts/images reflect that event’s perpetration of a high-level goof: Ostensibly it celebrated playwright Bertold Brecht receiving a long-overdue star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Except there is no such star for Germany’s socialist inventor of confrontational theater. (He deserves one: As a Nazi-fleeing expat in L.A., Brecht co-wrote the screenplay for the Fritz Lang-directed Hangmen Also Die!) Work is by Rountree plus Hannah Bhuiya, Brittany Menjivar, Joseph Mosconi, Zara Schuster, Ian F. Svenonius, Dakota Blue, Jean Marco Torres. Silicone God, Victoria Brooks (U.S.: House of Vlad, 2025, England: Moist, 2024)Here is part of my Introduction to the U.S. edition of this freak-ass novel: The characters and narrator(s) of Silicone God reference by inference what elsewhere has been termed The Singularity—the point where all technology hyper-evolves to one mass/individual consciousness. This is not a future historical period: It is a forever present. In Silicone God, that point is called Time. It manifests in the characters of future Silicone/human/god hybrids (their bodies composed of The New Flesh), while the Now is “our” limited experience as fleshly humans, also known as The Rotten. The author’s stand-in, Shae, envisions the Singularity of Time in passages that mix the cosmic with the tartly comic… and just plain bizarre… sometimes echoing (to me) the deranged geography of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations:“When I first saw the Sea of Time, I thought it looked like heaven. It was a heaving mirror, the same colour as the violet sunset and the silica under my feet. Massive cock-shaped mushrooms poked up among the dunes.” This partly explains Silicone God’s portal shifts of temporal teases. With tentacle-tongue in cheek, Brooks’ book’s dramatis personae embody a menu of preposterous and sublimely amusing monstrosity. Personal apocalypse is a hot and horny bitch mistress from a “future” (teasingly aggregated into the figure of Evaline), ever out-of-reach from a yearning ego-desire (loosely reduced to a self-conscious, auto-fictionesque narrator Shae). This scrambles “character” and “narrative.” Not to mention “gender.” And even “species.” Interrupting and disputing Shae’s chronology (directly on the page!) is Nez, a divine transexual character (created by mushroom gods 3,000 years in the future). Among these figures, a form of gender politics is at play. Males are backgrounded or subsumed into sometimes-competitive female psyches. And the carnally charged friction between these characters pistons plot conflict, intermingling their voices… suggesting that in Time, they are components of one God—or Goddess—psyche. Networking such concepts is a web of purposefully messy evolution imagery. This includes mushrooms, plus cephalopods and their anime tentacle-porn appendages. If mushroom gods usher in the Silicone Becoming of Time, does their form signify the phallus? As with the living, twitching dildoes in multiple sex-scenes, the answer is yes. Except, like everything in Silicone God, the phallus mutates, often mid-coitus, to female organs, and mixtures betwixt:“My little suckers cupped her skin – the slimy hot and cold sensations sending her wild. I put one on her clit, and carefully engorged it with blood so much that it became a mini cock. She begged me to kiss it till she came.”The Hamletesque, self-doubting narration of Shae jolts these freak shows with the frisson of lived experience. This is Silicone God’s twist on the (by-now) depleted or (always) ill-defined genre of auto-fiction. Did these scenes “really” happen? I don’t mean, did Shae’s legs really engorge into semi-autonomous octopus limbs, the better to pleasure her lover? But did the narrator want you to wonder if the author “really” was/is a multi-lover mistress gunning for full-on lesbo relations in a world of earthquaking gender norms? Or, is the shifting of skin and sexes a metaphor for lovers deceiving their intendeds and themselves? For seduction?Brooks cagily demurs. In a 2024 XRAY chat, she posited her theories of plastic narrative to me thusly: “My book gives dramatic colour to thinking around the mistress archetype, and I have been a mistress many times. So, some of the tougher scenes (and some of the hot ones!) are direct from experience. I've paired the very real, with the outright unreal.”

KYLE SEIBEL’S ‘HEY, YOU ASSHOLES’ IS NOT NEAT, BUT IT’S PERFECT: A CONVERSATION by Naya Clark

March 26, 2025

Kyle Seibel is not a veteran writer or a magical realism writer, but he is a veteran and his writing has magical and realistic attributes. He is still breaking into the literary world even though he seems to have a hang of it. He’s witty on a website we used to call Twitter, and can write a hell of a short story. Rarely does he add quotes when his characters are speaking and he doesn’t capitalize his story titles. Seibel is based in Santa Monica and lives with his wife and dog named Snacks—who also has an established internet presence now. In this interview, Seibel and I chat over the phone, discussing what it means to be a “break out writer,” the literary industry, crafting a story cocktail of real-life anecdotes and surrealism, and his short story collection Hey, You Assholes (Clash Books, 2025). Naya Clark: The nuance in the situations and the characters you write sometimes make your short stories feel surreal. Do you consider any of your work magical realism, or is that just happenstance?Kyle Seibel: No, I don't know if it's intentional, and I don't know if I could say it's magical realism. I think that comes with its own audience, parameters, and guidelines. I read that kind of stuff, so I imagine that it's had some impact on my work. I think there’s that feeling of uncanniness to something that's normal. I really love art that does that. It's the normal stuff, and that’s subverted by something absurd. Those contrasts and that tension make really interesting stuff happen in art. And that's the kind of stuff that I'm drawn to. David Lynch is the really big kind of tentpole in this kind of stuff. But then also, I think of Denis Johnson. There's a book called Jesus’ Son. One of my favorite stories in this book [called “Work”]—these guys are ripping copper wire out of a house that's been destroyed by a flood, and sell it for money to do drugs. And while they're getting all the wire out of the house, they see a naked woman in the air, and she's parasailing, being pulled by a boat down the river, and it's this guy's ex-wife. It's never explained, but I love that. There's this crack in reality, where something extraordinary comes through, and it throws all of what preceded it into a new context. I think that's a trick that I try to bring to my writing.NC: I feel it’s the same with life. Sometimes there is no understanding of reality, or justification for why something happened, or why you, in particular, saw a part of someone or a situation. I'm particularly thinking of “Be Gentle”.KS: That one, especially, is such a special story. It's one of these stories where I was kind of writing it and putting it together and had an idea of how I wanted to have the basic idea that a veteran gets a job at a computer lab and befriends a weirdo student. I started to really think about the idea of the weird kid in class. So, I would ask all my friends about their stories about their weird kid from class. And everybody has this story of that kid from class. I started to put them all together. This character of E.J. started to take shape, and he just became a very real person to me. So I developed the story over a couple weeks, and edited over a month or two, and I got very attached to it. At the end of the story, I think E.J.’s fate is pretty tragic, and I wrestled with it, because I think what I really wanted to do was to give a really happy ending to this kid, and I knew that wouldn't be honest to the story—wouldn't be honest to what this character has seen in my mind. You get the fast forward of what happens to E.J., but what I wanted to leave the reader with is the feeling of what anyone is capable of doing—to be gentle enough to hold a bee.NC: It’s one of those things that has no explanation. I feel it’s more realistic that this character didn't have a happy ending. You said E.J. was a culmination of people's stories of this kind of kid in school. Is that the same for most of your characters?KS: Several real anecdotes braided together to form some of the characters in the stories. There's a story [called “I Suppose You’ll Want To Know About My Life Now”] that is about a guy who, on the day his grandma dies, goes for a run along the beach and almost gets hit by a car, gets a boner, and then gets stopped by the police...so that story is several stories kind of all rolled into one. I think what it ultimately becomes is a love letter to this guy's wife, and I think I use part of it in my vows. So part of my vows are enshrined in that story. There's some language that's pulled from that. And then my last grandma died. I was on a bike ride in Santa Barbara. I don't run, so the running part was fiction, but I almost got hit on my bike by this woman in a car. This was years before I even wrote the story. It was kind of funny that it was not written in the moment it happened—it was only in reflection, years after. The first line of the story came to me and the rest wrote itself. I mean, the first line of the story is the title of it. Then I would realize that I was writing about my grandma. Then I realized I was writing to this woman that I dated in the Navy who had died. And then I realized that was all to my wife, Ali. So it was just a bunch of different things. That was how I drafted it. Then as I edited it down and made it more digestible, it became what it is now, which is a little bit tighter of a narrative. But yeah, that's how it starts: taking from anecdotes or these shreds of memory or something that sticks in my mind, or I've written down for whatever reason, and then just kind of slamming them together on the page and seeing if anything jumps out. I think that's...a chaotic approach. Maybe other people will have something more intentional, but that's how I've been doing it.NC: Something I appreciate about your writing is that it’s complex, but not flowery. I feel everyone can read your stories. How have you developed your distinct voice, and how do you edit to ensure it comes across how you intend it to?KS: I think a lot of the stories in this collection are representative of this style. Stories that feel like they're being told to someone. I feel that makes it feel so intimate. So an occasional second person is addressing the reader. I think that it can be effective. And feeling like a story is being told to you personally is a big part of the guiding style of the voice. There’s a lot of first-person stories in this collection. They are not all me, thinly veiled, at all. I try to let the characters speak in their voice in the stories. In doing so, you're understanding a character, but also why they're telling their story. It gives a sense of urgency, and I think that makes them feel readable. I think sometimes you can be reading a story for five or six pages and think this is beautiful, technically proficient, but why is this story being told to me? What's so important about this story? That's something I really try to center on. Is there a reason this person is telling you this story? It’s because they can't help themselves but tell it. This is this person's one story to tell, they're telling it to you right now. Hopefully, that's the kind of energy some of these stories bring.NC: I do think that is the energy they bring. I don't know what's been up with people hating first-person stories lately.KS: I thought people were mad at third-person stories.NC: Whichever number story perspective they hate this week, I don't know. But I feel how you do it is very effective. I think it makes it more intimate. Like a story that you hear when you're grabbing a drink and you meet a friend of a friend, and they start telling you a story. I will admit that your book was my plane read. I've been traveling a lot lately. So it's what I read when I'm on a plane to stay up. Your stories feel like meeting someone while traveling and they start telling you a story. Another thing that makes it feel that way is the rhythm of how you write your stories. The character always has a goal, they're on their way to do something, then there's these characters that are just so fucking stupid. I could imagine these being my friends because of their decisions and personalities.KS: “Newlyweds” is definitely a story. Those guys are boneheads. They just can't help themselves.NC: That’s one of those rules in writing: make your characters do something that when you're reading it, you go “God, no, why are you doing this?” Again, a lot of the rhythm is because there is a goal. How do you maintain rhythm when you're writing a short story?KS: I hate to shout out my experience as a copywriter at an ad agency, but I'm gonna have to. I'm gonna have to give it up to the absolute boot camp of writing that being a junior copywriter is. You have so little time. Not just in an ad, but of your creative director's time and of the client's time and attention. There's something about being a copywriter that you innately understand how media — regardless of whether it's art or just dog shit — is a competition. It is a competition for your attention. Knowing that as a copywriter, and being able to bring that sense of attention and competition is just something that is very useful. You understand about attention span. You're just not gonna keep people around forever if you don't hook them immediately. So that's always on my mind when I'm revising things and tightening things and going back and rewriting. I ask how big is the hook of this story? What is the sentence that someone will read and have to read the second one? Those are the stakes really, especially when a lot of this book was previously published online. The rule of digital media is they must be hooked immediately. Obviously, it's different for literature, and I think that the immediacy applies. I think that ended up giving my voice a real distinctive quality, especially in these couple stories.NC: Yeah, I will agree. That feeling of I need to get to the point quickly, or something else needs to loop around to almost give the reader whiplash from what's going on in the story...I do feel it is great training. I'm not saying that most writers should be copywriters at all, but it is an exercise in brevity. My background in journalism is another thing. So much of my writing is about getting to the point. How do you get this information across quickly? But bringing in that creative, surreal element that you bring feels like breaking the rules.KS: I will read some stories—of the kind you would read in The New Yorker or a big publication like The Paris Review—where the stories are almost mysteries to be solved. In some ways they're to be figured out, and their value is to be assessed by the complexity of the process in which you have to figure them out. I think there are exceptions to this rule. I'm generalizing, but when we were submitting Skylarking [novel] there was just no interest. We kind of had to let Skylarking go. I don't know what's happening with it now. So that was my big bummer this summer. I was waking up in the morning thinking “Do I want to do this anymore?” I feel all the stuff with the collection has been going really well, and all the stuff with the novel is just tedious, and I feel frustrated. I think there's just really strong headwinds in publishing right now in general. Publishers are tightening budgets and doing layoffs and stuff like that. So the tendency is towards safe bets. It’s not really a climate where people are taking huge swings on new voices.NC: Do you consider yourself a new voice? When do you think being a new voice and being an up-and-coming writer, or being someone deep in the literary world, starts?KS: Well, I think that you can have an infinite amount of debuts. I think everyone's a new voice until they've really broken out. That term, “breaking out”—I've heard a couple of writers recently use it without any hint of irony, and it’s just strange to me. I don't know if it exists anymore. I mean, I think it's rare that people talk about breaking out. It feels to me like a term of antiquity. It was just funny how we people can have three or four debuts—if the last one didn't reach that threshold of audience, or whatever. “Oh, it was just a chapbook. It was just a mixtape” kind of attitude. Does that make any sense?NC: It’s when you can start breaking rules in what you do. Although you consider yourself a writer, that's just breaking in. I do feel you break a lot of rules in your writing style and your grammar. I feel you've maybe gotten to a point where you can say “Fuck grammar.” For instance, your lack of quotations when characters are talking—what is the choice behind that?KS: I'm trying stuff in the collection. A lot of them are new, and then a lot of them are from when I first started writing fiction. I’ve had a change of heart about quotation marks. There is something about when I remove quotation marks from a particular story, I always tend to think that means the entire story is in quotation marks. They could almost be monologues. Maybe that’s how I've intended them to sound; as if they're all contained within one quotation mark. I think I was trying different things—to use voice, and use a point of view and perspective in a narrative way to frame it, as a deeper dimension of the story. Here it exists outside the text, or in the blank that you fill in. I don't know how effective it is or how much it’s working, but that's how I came at some of those stories.NC: I think it works really well. I feel this is a major goal for a lot of writers. If somebody were to show me your writing without your name or the title, after reading a body of your work, I can tell that it's you, because it creates a distinct writing voice. It kind of zooms out and becomes its own monologue. When you write a short story in particular, what is your goal?KS: I think that changes when I'm in different seasons of writing. Sometimes I will sit down to write a story that evokes a special or particular feeling, or a unique flavor of a broad feeling, whether that's loss or anxiety, or joy or horror. There are special kinds of nuanced feelings being explored. Something that feels rather broad, but bringing it down to its sinew, examining it and exploring it at that magnification. It makes it seem much more specific—much more personal and intimate. That's sometimes how I approach stories, and I think that's maybe a first draft kind of thing. Then the narrative takes over, and there's other craft things to consider the different components. That’s usually when I sit down to write a short piece, especially a flash piece. A piece under 1,000 words, I'll be out to explore the nuance of a particular feeling as a jumping-off point, using a personal anecdote as a way to explore it. And I think that's really as simple as those two things coming together, and then it becomes something else that evolves into other things. That's my goal...to bring those two things together.NC: How do you find a humorous voice and inject that in your writing?KS: It's tough and humor is hard. I'm not saying that I figured it out. It's so individual. What you might find funny, someone else might not find funny. It's so weird, having done a couple of readings this year and seeing what I think are funny jokes that just go nowhere. Then what I think are pretty, plaintive lines of narrative get big laughs. It is so strange getting that kind of immediate feedback on different parts of the language of a piece. The collection as a theme, it's kind of—that these are all assholes, right? On any day, everyone, anyone could be an asshole. And they could have a story too. There's something about the charming asshole that is a very, very funny and bewitching character. And I think it holds multitudes. There's an element of selfishness and cruelty and casual violence that some of these guys [in the collection] seem pretty accessible to. But then there's also a little humility and tenderness as well. And in the distance between those two there's humor. There's comedy. So I'm glad that people think it's funny and I'm okay if people don't think it's funny at all. I'm okay with both reactions.NC: Some of it is the situation that your characters find themselves in are realistic, yet they're absurd. Veterans or Navy guys. How much do you pull from your own experiences?KS: It's because those are the characters and settings that I'm familiar with. I think it just feels authentic. Some of these stories are stories that have been told to me third-hand, or things that have survived as memories that are probably not true, in the way that I remember them. Sometimes that can have its own kind of internal magic. The veteran stuff is interesting, because I definitely write about military veterans, but I don't think of myself as a veteran writer. I just don't think that I fall into that category neatly. I don't know if I have anything interesting or particularly meaningful to say on the subject of service. I think it’s almost besides the point that some of those guys are in the military. It just happens to be where their story is taking place.NC: That's your experience, so that's where you're coming from. Do you think it's important for writers to write at least some of what they know? Does that help your writing?KS: I think so...It lends to the authenticity of the story's construction. It gives credence to the more incredulous elements of the plot. So I think that in that way, it can be effective. I think it's important to pull from your own experience, but more than that, it's important to follow the story and have the story be at the center. To lose track of the story, or distract from the story, or to make a choice that deviates from where the story should go because it happened in real life, or because it was part of your real experience, doesn't impress me. That doesn't convince me of it. I think that there should be a point where the story takes over, and all the details and craft, and all the tools and elements and language, roll up to in service of the story that you're telling, and that should be preeminent. And if it happens, the story becomes centered around the factual narrative that you're pulling from. It's a simple question that I'm answering currently in my life.NC: So are there elements that you feel aren't your experience that you add that aren't from your life. How do you write something that you haven't experienced? For example, the “Fish Man” story.KS: This was a story that was told to me in the Navy over a cigarette. One guy grew up on a farm, and was telling us about how there was some sinkhole in this lake, and they couldn't figure out why they had to take all the fish out. What happened in the story is kind of what happens in real life. They did their best to save all the fish, and in the end, they went back the next day, and all the fish had jumped out and died, and they didn't know why. It was this big, crazy mystery. But then I was starting to think about it. I don't know how I came on this idea of a guy getting drunk and finding these fish in a municipal area. It was such a delicious premise for me. It unfolded as fable to me, with the boys finding him and helping, and it being this crusade. Then the idea that it was supposed to be this moment where everything changed and got better. Instead, it was the last breath of hope on a downward spiral. Very little in that story happened to me, except for the feelings of imminent failure. I think everyone feels, or has had the feeling of, nothing going right. Being one of those boys feels so real to me. Having written that story, I don't think it happened to me, but where I feel I show up in that story is not in the main character. It’s in one of the boys that comes across him. So I think that there are different perspectives in the story that I associate myself with, but it's not always the first-person perspective in the story.NC: I feel a lot of the stories, they're all trying—on a mission, a side quest—to do something that's right. As a writer, it's exciting because you don't have to be the main character or the narrator in the situation. You can even appear or identify with a side character in a story. It makes it feel like a lot less pressure to tell a story from another perspective.KS: A lot of times the narrator is the least interesting person in some of these stories. I'm thinking specifically of “cullen”. The main character in that story is having a nervous breakdown and a complete manic event. If you really wanted to make the wildest story Cullen would be the first person, and you would see it from his perspective. You would get a front-row view of his paranoia. But you don't get that. You get this. You get states removed. You get countries removed. This friend that he calls and who's going through his own kind of crisis and you see the real main human crisis is being viewed through a telescope in the story,NC: Right. These things are happening at the same time, but also in retrospect. Then there’s this idea of making it out alive. Something I really respect about your writing is that the endings aren’t always in a neat bow. How do you approach writing the ending of a short story?KS: The endings are truly mysteries. One of my friends, Mike Nagel, has always said“A good short story ends on a sharp intake of breath.” You're just coming to. You're being removed from the moment where the next thing happens. Which I think is interesting. I don't think this is the case for everything, but it can lead to some interesting results. The endings, I mess with so, so much. I'm rarely happy with it. I think sometimes the stories just exhaust themselves. Maybe that’s not being fair to the stories that are a little bit more tightly scripted.NC: Endings are hard, but you do them really well. You trust that the reader is intelligent enough to take from it what they want. They’re not neat, but they’re perfect.KS: I think the endings kind of revealed themselves. It was one of those things where I gave them to a couple early readers, and they had a bunch of notes about how to fix the rest of the story. But there was this unanimous consensus that the endings should be as is. And I think that was the same thing with “A New Kind of Dan” as well. I worked on that story for a long time, and got a lot of feedback on that story specifically. But then again, the unanimous consensus was that the ending, and the content that that bookends, is something solid and to be retained.NC: Thank you so much for this conversation.KS: I sounded insane 85% of the time. You got a good 15%.NC: It’s totally workable. I'll talk to you soon. Bye.

STUFF YOUR FACE WITH SCOTT LAUDATI by Scott Laudati

March 11, 2025

A special offshoot of our Recommends series, where Scott Laudati enjoys the planet’s best foodstuffs and eateries.New York City, 2010. It’s a 24-hour city. Budweisers are $3. We complain about the rent but a one bedroom is $950. Something big is happening every night in Brooklyn. The So So Glos are playing in a loft and our friend Dasha knows the door code. The garment building hasn’t been annexed by Netflix yet, its basement is rented by an old Marxist who calls it “The CCCP Gallery” and Drew is having his art show there tomorrow. And most importantly, pizza, which we eat on the way into the party and then again on the way home, is $1.50 a slice, and every block has a lit storefront where men are stretching dough and spreading sauce until last call.This city does not exist anymore. I don’t know when exactly it happened. One day the bodega became a grocery store. Then it was demolished entirely and a one story building became a ten floor high rise. The Budweisers don’t come with a shot special anymore, they are just $7 now. And your friends, who you sat in parks with, helped move couches down impossible flights of stairs, they just disappear. Where did they go? Why didn’t anyone invite you? Suddenly you’re all alone with no friends, nowhere you can afford to drink, no galleries to just pop into on your way home, and you ask yourself, “Did I make it all up?”This is a New York City tale as old as time, though. It’s never been a place anyone stayed ’til the end. And if you’re the last one left it means you didn’t get the girl or the memo, and now you’re forty with roommates. But something is happening here that has never happened before. New York City is losing its pizza. It’s losing it to indifference, to age, to a change in taste, but mainly—it’s money. The landlords have chased out everything else that once made New York great, and now they’re coming for the pizza.Most people won’t care, because most people have terrible taste. You see, not all pizza is being targeted. Every day, in every former working class (ghetto) neighborhood, a small storefront transforms into a hipster-hell zone with pizza at its core, but you would never know that at first glance. Because you’d have to wade through the Japanese models who are never eating or doing anything really but getting their picture taken. Or the other influencers posing with whatever sets this pizza joint apart from the other one-hundred vaguely punk rock, sweaty, mandatory four-hundred pencil tattoos on the cook’s arms. And the gimmick always comes across like it was conceived in a boardroom. Like a cute cup of ice cream, or the merch that repurposes Basquiat’s crown in “fun” new ways. “Edginess.” “No conformity.” Somehow your slice is always charred. It takes twenty-five mins to come out because they have to grate fresh parmesan over one slice at a time. But you can get laid at this place. And a band in Ridgewood will eventually write a song about it. So if that’s your idea of a good time, rock ‘n’ roll. But it’s not my thing. I like real pizza. I like it served by two brothers who took over the business from dad and now their rent’s about to become unaffordable after sixty years. Or a brother yelling at his sister to hurry up with the cup of Coke she’s filling from an ancient soda fountain. He takes the soda, slides two slices over the counter to you, and says, “$6.” Nothing in this city has cost $6 in almost a decade. You can smell old New York emanating off the wood-paneled walls of these joints. The ingredients are always fresh. The pies haven’t been sitting around and getting reheated all day. A man who loved pizza founded this place with his family’s name, and he put his blood into it because as far back as his line went it was all leading to this, and now his children remember that legacy, the struggle, the commitment, what it took to put food onto their tables after grueling hours, and so they put their souls into it, and whether you show up on Monday at 11 a.m. or Saturday at 10 p.m. every slice has been made with the same care and pride.Here are my Top 3, gold-medal, all killer, Peoples’ Champ winners of Williamsburg: Tony’s Pizza (Graham Ave.)I wanted to start with my favorite. This is the place I walk my dog to. Somehow they’ve kept this small room looking exactly like the Italian restaurants you remember from your childhood. The ones you went to after basketball games when your coach was buying for the whole team. They’ve got the small tables with the red-checkered table cloth. The old-timers from the block drink espresso and dunk a biscotti in like it’s Pisan fondu. They look a little side-eyed when you walk in with a dog, because this is an old-school neighborhood, but they break when she jumps on them and looks for a pet. Two brothers run around doing the prep work, if you want to talk they stop and talk, they’re funny, they’re tough, and two very pretty girls take your order, pet your dog, and if you’ve said the right thing you might even get a wink and a smile as they hand you your plate. And this triangle that’s on the plate, it’s a Mona Lisa, it’s a hug from your mom, it’s perfect. It unravels in your mouth with each bite. It’s not just mozzarella, there’re hints of other cheeses, like parmesan, maybe pecorino, a sharp cheese but a subtle note, and little flakes of oregano to round it out. There’s good distance between the crust, the sauce, and the cheese. Light on the oil, no char. It’s a clean slice you can eat in front of someone and not need a napkin. A famous pizza critic gave this place a 7.9. Only someone from Boston would miss the subtleties that make this pizza exquisite. Tony’s gets a 9.5 every time. No debate. Sal’s Pizza (Lorimer St.)Sal’s is pretty much the same vibe as Tony’s, and at $3.50 a slice, they’ve got a lock on the cheapest pizza in Williamsburg. There’s not as much in way of ambiance as Tony’s, but that’s not Sal’s fault. The stretch of Lorimer Street it’s been on for decades has flipped to the yuppies with expensive baby strollers, so there’re no Italians out front talking about the old days like Tony’s. But that’s okay because the pizza comes out quick, and when you take that first bite the cheese stretches out but snaps before it slops on your chin or shirt. And it’s a great slice. It’s so simple I feel stupid even writing about it. Sal found three things that can’t be improved when you put them together. The hipster spots will hire a guy on a unicycle to spread honey from an upstate bee farm on a slice and charge you $8 for it, and if you’re from the midwest you’ll be dazzled by the spectacle, and if you’re an idiot your brain will tell you it tastes better because you’ve got every color of the rainbow staring at you. But we need you to be better. We need you to realize a great song isn’t just an endless chorus. What makes it a piece of art is your need to return to it. Not just a box to check on your bucket list, but something to live with. To spend your days itching to go back again. How can Sal’s charge so little for a slice and cover the rent? Well, luckily this ain’t Papa Johns, and the guy who owns Sal’s is usually behind the counter, so you can ask him these kinds of questions. “I bought the business from Sal a long time ago,” he says, “And Sal owned the building when he opened up.” Here we have the American Dream. A man who owes nothing to no one. A man who bet on himself and won. So now the prices don’t have to rise with inflation. The ingredients don’t have to take a hit to cover the bottom line. This is what we call a victory in the game of Capitalism. Sal’s gets a 9. I’ve never had a mediocre slice. Vinnie’s Pizza (Bedford Ave.)Vinnie’s is the correct way to bridge the old and whatever this nightmare is that’s happening now. It’s been on Bedford Ave. since 1960, but if I didn’t just tell you that you’d never guess it’s eligible for Social Security. Aside from the classic New York style pizza, the interior of Vinnie’s is a time capsule of the Williamsburg that existed when I moved here, when it was more like the Lower East Side and less like a tech-boy playground. Street art and pizza paintings decorate the walls, a thousand band stickers are on the door, and a Ninja Turtles bench out front brings a smile to the face of everyone born in the mid-’80s. There’s a body type I associate with Vinnie’s that I never even see here anymore—a fat dude in skinny jeans, in a tight band shirt with a balding head and big full red beard. Does that make sense? It’s punk rock but I can’t really tell you why. Maybe it’s because I ran into Andrew W.K. there once at 2 a.m. Vinnie’s has none of the Italian thing that I usually require with my food. This should be a deal-breaker, especially where I’m from. We require authenticity here in New York above everything else, but there’s this ability skateboarders and artists and punks and trans kids have when they find a neighborhood that’s been abused and neglected by time. They take all the influences, the blank spaces, the garbage, the possibility of redemption, and through raw power they build their own thing, and this hustle brings a level of cool that supersedes any idea of what a neighborhood or restaurant is “supposed to be.” This is Vinnie’s. It’s the original punk rock pizza of Williamsburg, on a block that less than two decades ago was the raddest place in New York. And though it’s become one of the most expensive pieces of real estate on earth, Vinnie’s is actually still pretty close to the roots. A slice is less than $4. It tastes exactly like a slice of pizza should. It’s like a Budweiser. It’s consistent every time. There are no frills. It’s just awesome tangy cheese over a sweet sauce. And it’s open late. Fun fact, last time I was there Kieren Culkin was dragging a kid and a kid’s basketball hoop angrily past the Ninja Turtles bench looking like every choice he’d ever made was the wrong one. I’ve also seen Rosamund Pike on that corner as well as Michael Cera, Nas, Sean Penn, and Willa Ferryra. If you’re visiting, grab a slice at Vinnie’s and sit on that Ninja Turtles bench. You’ll see someone.

An Interview with Jeffery Renard Allen by Kenny Meyer

January 23, 2025

I was introduced to Jeffery Renard Allen’s brilliant short story collection, Fat Time (Greywolf Press, 2023), by Chaya Bhuvaneswar (prize winning author of Dancing Elephants). At the time I was a participant in her short story class. She made a habit of urging me to get out of my reading rut and explore the work of writers from divergent cultural backgrounds. Chaya had plenty of good things to say about Allen’s Fat Time, so I bought a copy.I should explain that I come from the opposite end of the cultural universe from Mr. Allen and the characters he portrays. I’m a seventy-plus-year-old retired programmer who grew up in Houston, middle class and Jewish. My reading has been a steady diet of southern gothic writers and the British and American classics. By contrast, Mr. Allen grew up in South Chicago and worked his way to a successful academic and literary career. His characters in Fat Time are people of color. Some from desperate circumstances. Some with world-class talent. Some brutalized. Some celebrated. Their stories are different as different can be from my own lived experience. And yet, I was enthralled. His stories were lyrical, literary and challenging in the best way. They took me to places I will never know.Mr. Allen responded quickly to my request for an interview, proving to be very approachable and an altogether authentic and decent fellow. He kindly agreed to answer a slate of questions. Some are about the Fat Time collection. Some are about craft. Some are about a writer’s life. Sometimes we’re lucky to connect in real time with a writer who affected us. KM: Mr. Allen, thank you for agreeing to an interview.JRA: Call me Jeff.KM: Cool. Let’s dig in. I found the writing in Fat Time beautifully lyrical. It’s also a complex and demanding read. When you compose, how much weight do you give to the reader experience?JRA: My first concern is to myself. In a nutshell, I write primarily because it’s what I do, writing is who I am. I work hard to create the best manuscript I can, something that I feel is an honest reflection of how I see the world. For whatever reason, I have a hard time telling a story straight. Also, language excites me. Language is my entry point to creation, meaning that part of my individuality as a writer gets expressed in my singular approach to words and syntax and rhythm.Some of my favorite writers—Proust, Faulkner, Nabokov, Henry James, John Edgar Wideman, Toni Morrison in Beloved—are demanding. They don’t/didn’t cut corners. (Well, James did try his hand at playwriting because he was desperate for money.) They were smarter than I am.Even if you consciously try to shape a manuscript to be more “commercial,” there is no guarantee that it will find a popular audience. As writers, we have little control over the market. Obviously, publishers spend a lot of time and money promoting a small number of books. But for me, writing is one thing, the publishing industry is another. Writing is an act of faith. All I can do is try to write the best manuscript I can.KM: How would you describe your ideal reader?JRA: They would be a person who enjoys and appreciates the pleasures and rewards of literary fiction, literary narrative. I am a political person, a progressive, a social democrat and internationalist committed to justice, for all people. Social and political concerns certainly inform my work, but they are secondary. I don’t believe that literature is an effective way to change political discourse or change the world. Not to badmouth anyone, but it seems to me that almost everyone in America now has political pretensions. It has become expected of us. I’m not interested in trends.I do my work. That said, I still hope to gain a larger readership over time. I am a huge fan of Michael Ondaatje. Somehow, he has been able to strike a balance between serious literary fiction and a popular readership. May I do the same.KM: The stories in Fat Time are vivid; the descriptions specific, often metaphorical and highly decorated. For example, the scene in “Heads” at the shawarma shop. “...the rim of the sky catching fire”, “trees bent like fingers,” “building ballooning,” and “tangled stalks of words.” All in the length of a random page. It’s lavish. When you compose, do these images tend to flow out in your initial visualization? Or are they primarily the result of considered and scrupulous revision?JRA: I’m gifted with a knack for metaphor. Simile, metaphor, and image—those come naturally to me. I think visually. (On one level I’m a failed visual artist. When I was a kid, I studied at the Art Institute of Chicago for several years.)I’m also a poet. Although I rarely write poetry these days, I still read a lot of poetry for inspiration. Perhaps I remain a poet at heart. As memory serves me, Jean Cocteau—poet, filmmaker, novelist, visual artist—said that he was a poet at heart and a poet in everything he created. The same could be said for Pier Paolo Pasolini, another multi- faceted artist.When it comes to metaphor, I would not separate that device from everything else that happens on the page. Namely, sound, music is important. I find tremendous inspiration in music, especially jazz, artists like John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Charlie Parker, among others. (On another level I’m a failed musician.) I strive for a type of syncopation in my prose. And I also strive for a type of layering, multiple directions and voicings.KM: Are you ever concerned that a metaphor might be strained or that it bogs down the flow of the narrative?JRA: In the revision process, I edit to make sure that I’m not overwriting, to avoid things like hyperbole, mixed metaphor, and sentimentality. But, as you know, writing is always paradoxical. So much goes into the initial drafts. I keep informal notebooks for every manuscript where I write down metaphors, images, sentences, and ideas. Revising is largely about concreteness and precision. As a writer I strive to be a stylist. Lyricism is not the same as purple prose.That said, I admire and appreciate all kinds of writing, including minimalists and writers who strive for a transparency of style. The important thing is to write well. And writing well is always hard. I maintain tremendous respect for anyone who gives their life to this largely thankless profession.KM: How do you begin writing a story? Do you typically start with a scene? A character? An oddity? As you’re building up a story, how do you tend to grow the narrative? Chronologically? Thematically? A Character reaction to circumstance? Some other method?JRA: I’m not sure if I have one formula for starting a story. First, let me speak to the pre- writing process. I’m in the early stages of planning a new collection of twelve stories, and perhaps the only commonality is that I want to write about some real people who interest me: Kunle Adeyanju, Virgil Abloh, Paul Robeson, Ota Benga, the Fiske Jubilee Singers, my former brother-in-law who has spent most of his life incarcerated, etc. I’m usually inspired by characters and situations. (What was life like for Paul Robeson when he lived in the Soviet Union? He never spoke about his time there. That gap in knowledge affords a space for my imagination.)When I begin writing, my general strategy is to start at a place in the story that I think I know best. That might be an image or a scene. It might be the beginning or the ending. Then I try to sketch out the overall shape of the story in a very rough and fragmented draft. At some point I begin to fill out the story scene by scene, section by section, although that filling in may not happen in strict chronological order.KM: The Fat Time stories are divided into Parts 1 and 2. What considerations went into that split and the ordering of the stories of the book?JRA: I don’t think of Fat Time as a collection of interrelated stories. I’m sure there are correspondences, but I did not plan those relationships. I had thirty ideas for stories and didn’t know if they would be one book or two or three. But I whittled those ideas down to the twelve stories in the published book.In some ways the stories are a mixed bag. Some stories are about Africa. Other stories are about the U.S.A. Some stories are set in the past. Others are set in the present or the future. Some stories are riffs on real people or inspired by real people. Others are about completely imagined people. In organizing the stories, I placed them in an order that made sense to me. I do think there is a sense of narrative momentum as you move from one piece to another. And the collection seemed to naturally fall into two parts.KM: Did the editors participate in the ordering?JRA: My editor at Graywolf Press, Ethan Nosowsky, did not make any suggestions about the ordering of the stories, although he gave many other important suggestions. However, he did with my first collection, Holding Pattern. He even suggested that I retitle the collection. (It was initially called Bread and the Land after one of the stories in the collection.)In the new collection of twelve stories I’m working on, six stories are set in the past while the other six are set in the present. Pretty simple.KM: The stories in Fat Time include historical characters. They might be considered historical fictions. I once heard Hillary Mantel give a talk. She said that in her books about Thomas Cromwell, she was deeply concerned that the narrative be historically accurate. The fiction was used to animate her characters. During the talk, she proposed a moral high ground for historical novelists. She argued that “...We shouldn’t recirculate the errors of the past generation or their prejudices. We should join in an honest project to help the public understand that history is not just a body of knowledge but an interpretive skill.” Do you feel constrained to avoid ‘alternative facts’? Is it important that a reader of Fat Time finish the story with an accurate understanding of Jack Johnston, or of the atrocities in South Africa, or the degenerate life of Francis Bacon?JRA: I don’t think of myself as a writer of historical fiction. I have no interest in writing fictional narratives that dramatize events and people of the past. Instead, I write riffs on real people, places, and situations, what some people might call alternative histories. I view this as a form of speculative fiction, more so given the supernatural elements in my fiction. I would characterize myself as a modernist in terms of technique and my concerns. But I’m also a fabulist.When I do research, I’m not driven solely by a concern for historical accuracy. I’m also looking for gaps in the historical record that will allow me to invent narrative. And I’m also looking for interesting facts that I can riff on. For example, I read that Francis Bacon lived in South Africa for a time during his early adulthood. Given my interest in Africa, that was a fact I knew I needed to use. Then I thought about something my doctor had told me years earlier. She had a photograph of herself petting a lion taken on a safari in Kenya. She explained to me that in that moment she was so terrified of the lion that she urinated on herself. In “Heads,” Bacon urinates on himself when he pets a lion in South Africa. This is often how things come together for me when I compose a story.As for Jack Johnson, I don’t think I’ve ever read anything about how he spent his time in Australia when he went there in 1908 to fight Tommy Burns for the heavyweight championship. That was the starting point for the story “Fat Time.”For the Miles Davis story, “Pinocchio,” my original plan was to write a fragmented narrative that dramatized various anecdotes I heard about Miles from various people who knew him, incidents that I had never seen in any of the biographies about him. But then other things began to make it into the story. For example, the nephew in the story is based on my friend Anthony Chisom who died tragically the way the nephew dies in the story. In addition, my Miles Davis is still alive and well. His evil deeds extend his longevity, lengthen his life, my take on the Pinocchio story. And, of course, Miles recorded a song called “Pinocchio,” which was, among other things, inspired by the Disney cartoon.KM: I found your use of time very inventive. For example, the story “Fall” begins in the middle and folds back in time as if told in a recollection. That’s preceded by “Testimonial” which reads like a prologue to “Fall.” It’s a puzzle at first. There aren’t many clues. These relative placements were disorienting, but make perfect sense on second reading. How do you arrive at the sequence of the story telling? Do you have a design in mind? Perhaps there’s an effort to replicate a dinner-table conversation where the teller leaves out important details that must be filled in with digressions. Or is the order governed by the sequence of composition? Or some other method that you could describe?JRA: Every story comes about differently. (Miles Davis advised, “Play what the day recommends.”) “Testimonial” is the earliest story in the collection since I wrote it in October 2001, a few weeks after 9/11. It was my response to 9/11 and came to me in the form of a dream.“Fall” was more planned. I saw the Nat Turner film, The Birth of a Nation, back in 2016 when it first came out, and I was so disappointed with the film that I began making plans to write my own story based on Nat Turner. Then I began to think about Nat Turner in terms of certain conflicts in the political world today. I spent a lot of time in Tanzania and learned about the horrible phenomenon where people with albinism there are hunted for their body parts. So I decided to do a kind of retelling of Nat Turner’s revolt focused on people with albinism in a fictional African country with Turner’s “confession” still serving as a model (structural) for the piece.Overall, I see every element of a story in terms of the progressive development of conflict. So, for example, I don’t think of flashbacks or past action as “exposition.” Timewise a story can move in any direction and push the conflict. Also, asides and dreams can amplify the conflict. I’m drawn to the sea of African time where past, present, and future exist all at once. And I think of reality as a layered continuum encompassing the unconscious, dreams, fantasies, altered states, and the everyday. So rarely do I think of a narrative in terms of beginning, middle, and ending. Much else can happen. For me, narrative is always mythical, archetypal. I’m not a realist. And linear narratives feel artificial to me. I’m more drawn to broken and circular narratives, what I call “shadow narration.”KM: Could I get you to think back to your days as an emerging writer? No doubt you received comments from other writers, instructors, and editors. Some helpful; some not. There seems to be two verdicts... our own and our readers. When revising, do you make pragmatic compromises on the advice of a trusted reader? How did you, or do you, go about reconciling the two?JRA: I don’t have any first readers, although I do from time to time share a recently finished manuscript with a friend. Usually, I have a strong sense that a manuscript is or isn’t working because I’m a slow writer and spend a lot of time trying to get everything right. But I’m also aware that a good editor can see things that a writer can’t. I speak from experience since I’ve had the good fortune of working with people like Ethan Nosowsky, my editor at Graywolf Press.In composing a manuscript, I think it’s important for a writer to have a strong sense of what s/he hopes to achieve and say in a manuscript before seeking out the feedback of others. I don’t think it’s the job of a first reader (or workshop cohort) to “correct” your manuscript. Part of the process of developing as a writer is coming into your own with regard to voice, vision, and value. How do you see the world? How can you articulate what you see in language that is uniquely your own? Finding answers to these questions will involve discovering what you value in literature (and in other art forms). Which writers speak to you? Why? As a developing writer, ninety percent of what you learn comes from reading and from learning how to read properly. I like craft books that focus on reading. I’ll mention two here. I really like Francine Prose’s How to Read Like a Writer. The title says it all. I’m also a big fan of Madison Smartt Bell’s Narrative Design, which focuses on structure as opposed to the workshop format.Some writers don’t believe in the workshop process because workshops can take a boilerplate approach that allows no room for individual expression or innovation. As well, some developing writers will take every opinion in a workshop as the truth and try to respond accordingly. I would advise the writer to listen to the people in the workshop who seem to understand what he is attempting to do in a manuscript.However, every writer is different. Some people rely on readers. Others don’t. As I said earlier, I don’t. To each his own.It’s worth bearing in mind that the workshop is an American invention, and that most writers in other parts of the world develop outside of the workshop system. However, an MFA writing program can have its benefits like affording one time to focus on writing and reading in a supportive community of like-minded writers.KM: You write frankly and vividly about sex between the characters in “Big Ugly Baby.” Do you have any advice for writing sex scenes? Any words of caution? Any red lines that shouldn’t be crossed?JRA: It goes without saying that it’s hard to write about sex in literary fiction or any literary narrative, for that matter. Usually, sex in literary fiction is psychological. But that can easily become a cliché. So how can you write about sex and make it fresh and interesting, without it becoming either trite or pornographic? A year or two ago I read Lady Chatterley’s Lover for the first time and was surprised that so many people at one time found the novel scandalous. I found the novel moving and powerful. Lawrence often gets a bad rap, but I think his best work—the short stories and novels like Women in Love—are as good as anything. Lawrence was doing his best to figure out love, both heterosexual and homosexual, and he tried to write about it honestly, even if he got some things wrong. His work never feels pornographic to me.But pornography can be a good thing if you’re writing satire. Satire is best when it offends. (Think of the brilliant South Park. Or think about Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, which is in large part about a dude who gets an erection whenever the Nazi’s fire a V rocket at London.) So if you’re writing satire, you may want to cross all the red lines when it comes to sex.KM: Do you consider yourself to be a polemical writer? I was wondering because “Orbits” struck me as a polemical piece. It’s a fantasy about the life of the black princess Laila. The daughter of the world’s leader, a descendant of Malcom X, who, with the aid of Moon People, have ascended to the leadership of the world government. It’s a troubled time. A porcine curse has turned black people into pigs. White devils have tails amputated and they turn green if they die. Survival of the race depends on good relations with the Moon. Is it reading too much into the story to find racial overtones in this cast of characters?J.R.A.: I’m not a polemical writer. As I said earlier, I’m a fabulist. Before anything else, “Orbits” is a work of speculative fiction. This story has a specific origin. Some years ago, I met Elijah Muhammad’s youngest daughter. She explained that when she was a girl growing up in Chicago, she and her father lived across the street from Muhammad Ali. Ali gave her her sixteenth birthday party at his home. That was the origin of the story. Something else happened. Once, I was on a bus in Brooklyn and overheard an older member of the Nation of Islam telling a teenage boy that there are people living on the moon. These people live inside the moon and have a lifespan of a hundred years. The third source of the story was an incident that I witnessed when I was in high school in the late seventies. I developed this coming-of-age story from three different sources. Other things in the story riff on the actual beliefs of the Nation of Islam.KM: Cultural norms change. For example, Flannery O'Connor wrote her satires when racism was normalized in the culture. Her stories use lashing humor and demeaning stereotypes to make moral statements. They often rile people up. It seems to me that a story like “Everything that Rises Must Converge” is still relevant to our time. Do you think someone like Flannery O'Connor is worth reading in the current cultural context? Should she still be read? Or is the preservation of her work like a statute of Bedford Forest, something to be shunned?JRA: I don’t believe in censorship. That includes “canceling” artists for their aberrant beliefs or abhorrent behavior. Just as some readers might be offended by some of the racist statements Flannery O’Connor made in interviews, other readers might object to the heavily Catholic nature of her fiction. Flannery O’Connor is one of my favorite writers. I find her stories brilliant on many levels—funny, wicked, violent, and highly symbolic and resonant.If I read a story or look at a painting or see or movie or listen to a piece of music, I take the art for what it is. I don’t know anything about the person who created it. If I’m impressed or blown away by the art, I will probably do some research and find out more about the artist. But I’m not doing so as a way of discovering some troubling facts about the artist for the purpose of dismissing the artist and his/her work. I think we need to rebel against that Stalinist approach to art and artists.KM: I’m retired now, but when I was working, I did a poor job of keeping the working hours in check. I was captive to my obligations. As you were coming up as a writer, did you ever struggle choosing between life and the project of writing? Is there any warning you might offer to young writers making their way? Any hints about the best way to balance the creative and commercial portions of the job?JRA: In an interview once, Miles Davis said something like “Music is ninety percent of my life. My wife and friends are the other ten percent.” I think here he speaks to the obsessive nature of art. My experience has been that making art is an obsession. You do it because you have to. You don’t have a choice. It’s a calling. It’s who you are.On a typical day, I wake up early, before 5:00. I walk for 90 minutes. Then I start writing. I work for four hours. I try to find time later in the day to read for at least two hours. And I also jot down notes and ideas. That’s a full day. But time has to be made for your partner, your family, and whatever else. And even when you’re not writing, you’re thinking about it, mulling over some idea or problem. In an interview, Miles Davis says, “I think about music all the time. I’m even thinking about it now.” That’s how it is, making, creating.I don’t believe there is an easy solution to the work-life balance. The reality is, if you are genuinely an artist, writing needs to be something more than a hobby. You have no choice but to maintain a schedule. The disciple of a schedule is crucial to creating work. The best you can do is work out some compromise with your partner and family. And you have to also earn a living.When I taught full-time, I asked for classes in the afternoon and evening so that I could write in the mornings. But I know some writers who can’t write for an entire semester when they teach. They completely focus on teaching.When I go away to an artist residency, I put in more than four hours a day, usually at least eight hours. I have even worked around the clock.Writing is a torturous process. The process is hard, both mentally and physically demanding. However, if I take a day off from working/writing I feel guilty. Being a writer is both a blessing and a curse.KM: Writing is often described as a lonely pursuit. However, it’s my understanding that to have a literary career today, it’s necessary to take a leading role in the marketing and promotion of your own work. Is that your experience? Do you see yourself reading on stage as you write? Does a successful writing career demand a person develop performance skills? Would you advise an emerging writer to cultivate some showmanship? Is getting a book published a little like the dog who catches a bus?J.R.A.: In today’s market, reclusive writers like J.D. Salinger, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Octavia Butler would not get published. One reality of the publishing industry today is that publishers expect you to promote your work through public appearances and on the Internet. So it is.That said, writers are not actors. And not every writer is a performer or showman. (Harlan Ellison would go to a bookstore and sit in the window writing a new story. That evening he would read the story to the public.) I would encourage a writer to simply feel comfortable and confident in public. And read your work in your natural voice, with your inflections and rhythms.It's also important to find a suitable passage to read before an audience. Not every passage is suitable to a reading. Select a passage that reads well. And remember to look at the audience from time to time. Make eye contact.KM: Before closing, I’ve got to ask, what book did Lamont pull off the shelf in “Big Ugly Baby” or Laila in “Orbits.” I’m sometimes asked by friends for short story suggestions. With emerging authors in mind, are there three short stories by contemporary authors you would consider essential reading? Are there three short story collections by contemporary authors you consider essential? What’s important about those works?J.R.A.: I recently read a terrific collection by a Bolivian writer, Liliana Colanzi’s Our Dead World. The stories were surprising and never predictable. Most serious readers by now should know Edward P. Jones’s two short story collections, Lost in the City and Aunt Hagar’s Children. Jones is like nobody else. The stories are smooth and simple on the surface, with the energy and momentum of spoken tales. He brings his characters alive on the page. I’m also a huge fan of John Keene’s Counternarratives. Keene explores a wide range of locales, forms, modes, and voices in this masterful collection.But let me not stop there. John Edgar Wideman is a master of the short story. Wideman totally reimagines the form through a narrative voice that both is and isn’t him, that both is and isn’t autobiographical. Start with his first collection, Damballah, and read all of them. The Nigerian writer Igoni Barrett is also a terrific short story writer. His stories are traditional in form, but they sparkle and are alive. The late Mavis Gallant is not a contemporary, but she is one of my favorite writers. I would recommend her collection Paris Stories, which was curated by Michael Ondaatje. She has a Chekhovian range where each story has the depth of a novel. She was a remarkable stylist and always found innovative ways to approach the short story form.KM: Thanks Jeff. You’ve been very generous. This has been a wonderful experience.J.R.A.: No sweat. Happy to do it.

CHARLENE ELSBY RECOMMENDS: Books from the Void

January 21, 2025

Since I went to VoidCon 2023, I’ve pretty much been catching up on the books I acquired there. And the problem only got worse after VoidCon 2024. Organized by Evan Dean Shelton and Edwin Callihan, VoidCon is a curated convention for weird fiction and weird horror, including literature, art and music. Art’s that, like, “wouldn’t it be nice if it found commercial success” but nobody’s expecting it to. The void aesthetic is irreverent and fun while dark and existentially horrid, and militantly encourages the participation of diverse voices on their own terms. So as an artificial way of imposing order on this “Recommends” list, I’m choosing to focus on Void-related works. Otherwise, there’s just too much out there to love. Joe Koch, The Shipwreck of Cerberus (self-published limited edition, 2023)Joe Koch is known around the void as the “King of Horror,” and The Shipwreck of Cerberus is the perfect example of why. It’s adorably small, like a Filthy Loot book, and a Joe Koch limited edition. He was kind enough to set aside my numbered copy so I could pick it up at VoidCon 2023. The action revolves around Rex, who has some interesting sexual encounters with a green woman and an actor-father figure whose decapitated head Rex has an established relationship with. The magic of the book is how you can open it to any page and read a beautiful sentence that evokes an immanent and other-worldly image. Joe Koch gives zero fucks about making it easy for the reader, because he is more concerned with being superb. Brian Allen Carr, Edie & the Low-Hung Hands (Small Doggies Press, 2013)I got this from Brian at VoidCon 2024 because it’s the one nobody else has and holy fuck, Brian Allen Carr is good. This is a short novel about a guy with very long arms just killing the fuck out of everybody, but the emotional sincerity of this character, his trials and tribulations, and his love for Edie ring so true. There’s a category of art that’s just the plain and simple statement of something soul crushing, and Brian Allen Carr is in there, along with Fred Eaglesmith, Neil Young, and Cormac McCarthy. I also feel a bit like Carr has tricked me into empathizing so hard with this long-armed murderer. But I am with him, for him, and I don’t care what he has done. I believe it was inevitable, understandable, and he should be lauded as a genuine hero in an unkind world—a tragic hero. OF Cieri, Lockdown Laureate (Castaigne Publishing, 2023)I picked up this collection from Castaigne Publishing after reading OF’s Backmask, which I gather got a whole lot more attention than these stories. There’s one blurb on the back from Evan Dean Shelton, who is the publisher. But damn, people, read this book. It’s beautifully illustrated by Rachel Lilim. The paper is good quality, and the cover can take a harder beating than anything I’ve had printed on demand. And then there are the stories. It’s the kind of grimy literature that makes you feel the best and worst parts of being alive simultaneously. It’s isolation and social performance and an interiority you’d be privileged to access and oh wait you can if you just read the book. I read the whole thing on one plane trip. OF has style plus content plus a gracefulness of expression that propels you forward in the text. I loved every minute of it. Michael Tichy, Wound of the West (Castaigne Publishing, 2023)I traded Tichy for this collection of “Four Harrowing Tales from the Draw” at VoidCon 2023, and goddamn, Tichy can write. The West is the old timey American west, and the wound is a scalping that the character in the first story survives. Tichy writes like someone who’s been scalped and left for dead and then come to accept it. There’s a gravity to it and a peace. Just read this: “Will is eating the same hare, drinking the same muddy water, sweeping the creeping sand out of a doorway that you stare at each day and hope, pray that some shadow comes to break the light apart. That someone will darken that doorway and kill you or save you, because you can’t do either yourself, and at this point both come to the same.” It’s devastating how at home with despair he is. Highly fucking recommended. Justin Lutz, Give Unto Us (Ghoulish Books, 2024)I picked up Justin Lutz’s novella at VoidCon 2024, after I previously wrote a blurb for his short story collection Gone to Seed, at the request of Ira from Filthy Loot. Give Unto Us is a hole story—a family (mom, dad, and toddler) move into a lakeside house that turns out to have a sandpit in the backyard, and the sandpit exchanges items they drop in for items it acquired from the previous owner before his unexpected death. Of all the void books, Justin Lutz seems pretty normal, in the sense I could see this selling copies. I would definitely watch this movie, and I would gleefully watch the part where Trevor just fucking boots his toddler (away from the sandpit), because Lutz understands that it’s funny when children get hurt. Rios de la Luz, An Altar of Stories to Liminal Saints (Broken River Books, 2023)I will always associate the Broken River Collective with the void, because they were well-represented in its inaugural year, even though I didn’t meet Rios until a few months later at AWP. Her book of short stories feels like the rose+eyeball+anatomical heart being pierced by the fiery dagger that graces the back cover. Her prose is piercing, impossible, and bloody. The back of the book says that the stories within were inspired by motherhood, and she does not hold back. It’s the lyrics of music inspired by the heavens and the answer to the question of what if emotions had viscera. David Simmons, Eradicator (Apocalypse Party, 2025)Simmons is a grotesque master of ceremonies with a heart of gold. He had the crowd mesmerized when he read a story called “Whole Time” at VoidCon 2023. (You can listen to it on the Agitator Patreon site for free.) After that, I read the Ghosts of East Baltimore and Ghosts of West Baltimore set, which tell the tale of Worm, a recent felon whose release catalyzes a series of absurd and gory events. So obviously when I had the opportunity to read the manuscript for Eradicator, I jumped at it. Simmons is hitting at the extremes with this one. It’s hilarious, disgusting, relatable… if you laughed at the end of The Substance, check out Eradicator, forthcoming 2025. Alexandrine Ogundimu, The Longest Summer (CLASH Books, 2023)I feel like Alexandrine Ogundimu should be on every list. For me, she’s the third in a triangle of horror writing grounded in filth and despair, alongside Elle Nash and BR Yeager. This novel is hard to summarize, because its effect has nothing to do with the plot and everything to do with the fact that Ogundimu’s sentences feel like they were only made possible after a hard run through a deep pool of pain and self-reflection. It’s biting and revelatory in a way that, “This is a book about someone accused of stealing from a store that seems very similar to but legally distinct from Hot Topic” doesn’t capture. Alexandrine participated in the void prompts leading up to VoidCon 2023 (This was a series of writing prompts using a word-of-the-day distributed by group chat on Twitter.) Maybe next year she’ll show up for real. Stanley Stepanic, A Vamp There Was (Encyclopocalypse Publications, 2024)This book has three parts – the first part epistolary fiction about a man named Middy who falls in with a vamp who happens to be a vampire, and this fiction is supplemented by historically accurate facts about Fredericksburg, Virginia in the 1920’s. This is followed up by a scholarly essay on how the “vamp” character of the time is conceptually distinct from a vampire but certainly meant to recall the bloodsucker’s image. Rising feminism finally made women threatening enough to take on the role. The title is a nod to the 1915 film A Fool There Was, starring Theda Bara as the seductress who ruins the life of an unsuspecting family man. The rest of the book gives short biographies of notable vamps of the time, which reminded me of Debra Nails’ The People of Plato. This book shines in how it provides the explicit historical context for its own story, and I’ll always remember this aha moment from when Stepanic is putting the pieces together for me about how, according to the historical record, woman becomes monstrous simultaneously as she becomes capable of exerting her own agency—that for a whole movement in popular culture, becoming master of one’s own fate and becoming a monster are the same thing. Honourable mentions to Evan Dean Shelton and Edwin Callihan, whose books I blurbed. (You can go read about them on the publishers’ websites.)

AUG STONE RECOMMENDS: Steve Aylett, Kevin Maloney, Madeline Cash, John Patrick Higgins

January 16, 2025

Steve Aylett, The Book Lovers (Snowbooks, 2024) .Steve Aylett is back with a new novel that could very well be his best work yet. In The Book Lovers, Aylett’s fireworks are at maximum intensity – dazzling, dizzying, and coming straight at you. Launched from one of the all-time great opening lines – ‘A book is like you and me – glued to a spine and doing its best’ – the text is hilarious, profound, and just a delight to engage with. Almost every sentence is rich, full of meaning, and contains enough avenues of thought to construct a city around. The majority of these sentences lay out truths so deep one wants to sit and spend an afternoon contemplating them. The writing, however, sweeps you along, crackling with electricity, megavolts on their way to illuminate heart, brain, and soul. I’m not the only one singing such high praises, the cover – and the artwork is lovely – features similar commendations from Alan Moore, Michael Moorcock, and Robin Ince. No one writes prose like Steve Aylett, or has quite such a singular worldview, ultra-cynical but way too funny to be completely despairing. His is a precision that appears out of thin air a millimeter away from its target. “‘It’ll get worse before it gets better’ – the fact that this statement is perennial should tell you something,” explains Sophie Shafto. Hugo Carpstein tells Inspector Nightjar “It’s your job to depict justice, isn’t it?” It’s that ‘depict’ that is perfect, saying so much about the surface level workings of government and its employees. As referenced above, there’s some of Aylett’s best character names too, and this is reflected in the version of 1885 London the book is set in, with locations such as Shroomsbury, Kimlico and Biccadilly. Another excellent joke I want to point out is ‘Albion holds its citizens in two cupped hands, and is sometimes so pleased it applauds.’The setting is quite literally a steampunk world. Steam being one of the three main forces that powers industry here. The other two being voltaics and the wonderful ‘denial engine’, which the human race has most likely been running on since the dawn of time. There’s more plot here than in a typical Aylett book, though one can be forgiven, what with everything else going on, for not catching every detail. Sophie, daughter of magnate Lord Shafto, has been kidnapped and Inspector Nightjar is on the case, interrogating a cast of personalities who, whether given the chance to speak or not, spout sidesplitting bizarre complaints often only tangentially related to the topic at hand. With the book being so much about, well, books, it is tempting to look for Aylett himself behind the masks of say Hugo Carpstein or Sir Percy Valentine, and a description of the writer Emmanuel Feste describes our author to a tee – “an obscurity with a sixth sense of humour who was said to have blown ‘a swarm out of a whistle’, shouting from one horizon to the next about how morality is not altered by altitude and annoying all by demanding that his pursuers keep up.” Sophie Shafto is a precocious youth who has sensed the importance of books from an early age. “In a box of sunlight by the window she tasted a vibratory honeychain of ideas confirming that human beings think and feel, a fact unacknowledged by the real people in her young life.” Books abound through the text, as they should in something called The Book Lovers, and there is a lovely bit of prescience in the fact that despite this being the late 19th century the population has become engrossed in ‘mirrored books’, complete with leather spines, held in one’s hand and gazed at all day long, an excellent dig at cell phone culture. And while these are an example of the superficiality of the masses, The Book Lovers is a testament to the power of books – in what it says about them and what it is itself. Kevin Maloney, Horse Girl Fever: Stories (Clash Books, 2025)In Kevin Maloney’s fiction there is always something wondrous happening, often pop-culturally infused, and the narrator is keenly aware of both. They happen to and around him, and his retelling of such experiences is almost always hilarious. This is greatly aided by the hyperawareness of their own shortcomings and willingness to dive headfirst into them. Maloney’s narrators keep falling deeply in love with every woman they see, whisk the willing of these off to exotic locales, and will most likely at some point vomit over themselves from drink, drugs, or a cocktail of the two. That’s not to say these stories are purely comedy or that the frequently dark subject matter – suicidal strippers, surprise deaths, teenage drug addicts and dealers – aren’t handled with concerned care. And the tone itself is never too dark, even when worlds are completely falling apart. I won’t conjecture that this is Maloney’s reason for writing these stories, but there is a (often desperate) need on the part of the narrators to connect with another human being, body and soul, no matter what the cost. Fortunately, some of these objects of affection are aware this isn’t in his best interest. For instance in the final story, ‘Epicenter’, where – after he’s been tossed into the alleyway by a gigantic bouncer and there attacked and bitten by a rat – a stripper tells him he doesn’t want to date her. Maloney’s presented circumstances seem as much jokes as they are all-too-real possibilities. There’s a lot of ridiculousness but it’s the kind of ridiculousness that is life. And I can’t overemphasize how funny Maloney is. A lot of that is down to his killer succinctness. His ability to give a tight, honest assessment of a situation with optimal word choice is powerful indeed. The first three stories – ‘Ghost’, ‘Hannahs’, and the titular ‘Horse Girl Fever’ – all blend comedy and tragedy in the above manner and offer the widest range of emotions in this collection. Next up, ‘King Of The Pit’ is less nuanced, an account of seeing Alice In Chains during the third Lollapalooza, but it keeps getting funnier and funnier as undefined drugs crank up the mayhem of that strange bonding ritual known as the mosh pit. ‘Wrath Of The Red-Eyed Wizard’ is an ode to navigating work, alcohol, and sex after turning 40, while ‘Malaria Diaries’ sees the narrator and his whirlwind romantic partner cheating death down in Columbia. ‘The Informant’, one of the best stories of the bunch, takes things back to pure comedy, though the setting is still pretty dark – a dry run for drug smuggling gone very wrong. Within the humor, Maloney manages to throw in some wonderful descriptions of the U.S. Southwest – “spent the night whizzing across the mystical dreamscape that some people insist on calling Arizona”. The drugs keep on coming, and ‘No No’ is a first person recreation of Dock Ellis’ 1970 no-hitter, pitched under the influence of LSD. Given the subject matter, it fits right in. ‘Bloop’ is also a highlight, a few days spent experimenting with a drug called Lotricaine, an anti-fungal cream for birds. This new high goes beyond ketamine, which itself is excellently described as “makes you feel like you ripped the wings off a Pegasus and used them to fly over the city of your birth, laughing at your enemies”. The past few years have proved that autofiction can be very funny indeed, with Maloney’s 2023 novel The Red-Headed Pilgrim being one of the best of the genre. Horse Girl Fever proves a fine addition to his work. Madeline Cash, Earth Angel (Clash Books, 2023)Speaking of hilarious autofiction, Madeline Cash’s Earth Angel is a delight. Cash’s prose is sharp, crisp, ironic yet real in a very pleasing way. Her dialogue is even punchier. Nothing wasted here. Her descriptions are always charmingly odd yet perfect to the situation. The humor comes from numerous angles – irony, a childlike wonder at the shit adults get up to, bemusement at all human interactions, wry acceptance of particularly puzzling aspects of modern life even while our humanness rails against them. In the first story, plagues have descended upon us, but at least this proves that God exists. This is followed by ‘The Jester’s Privilege’, an over-the-top account of a ludicrous though entirely-plausible-in-this-day-and-age PR job, changing the public face of a terrorist organization. While that’s happening the narrator also deals with a heavy friendship rivalry based on status, this derived from work and lovelife, and her own tepid uncertain romantic relationship. And kudos for a couple hilariously dark lines in a wedding speech. The two best stories are the title tale and ‘Slumber Party’. The latter being one of the funniest short stories I’ve ever had the pleasure to read. Nearly every sentence is a gem. The narrator wants to have a sleepover for her 30th birthday but after it becomes apparent how out-of-touch she is with her closest friends, she hires a company to create the experience for her. The corporateness of the affair is outrageously funny while the cost of the whole thing is simply outrageous. Cash has a unique sense of callback, always unexpected and, again, very droll. While Cash’s work is mostly comical, it’s not all so. There are keen observations about the awful way men too often treat women. One aspect of the title story is Anika’s truly horrific boyfriend, the famous actor Jake Willner, an ultra-violent control freak. While Cash details Anika’s attachment to him, Anika also of course has her own agency, the main part of the story being her interactions with the CEO of ‘Nosi’, a highly toxic and controversial fragrance machine manufacturer, who she’s tied to a membership program impossible to get out of. The different layers ‘Nosi’ operates on is bound to bring a smile. Another arrow in Cash’s comedic bow is when she has characters drop matter-of-fact truths. There are many excellent uses throughout the book, delivered in sniper-esque single shots, and said CEO neatly summing up Jake Willner on page 76 is exceptionally devastating. Cash also has a great sense of how amusingly complicated anything can get, shown at the end of ‘Earth Angel’ when she explains why Anika’s little brother doesn’t want to press charges against the car that broke his tibia. All the best qualities of Cash’s work culminate in this story. And these seeds blossom across this entire collection. John Patrick Higgins, Fine (Sagging Meniscus, 2024)With his debut novel, Higgins capitalizes on the dark humor offered up in his short dental surgery memoir, Teeth. Fine is not strictly a comedy novel, however. While there’s jokes aplenty – and almost every chapter title is a pun – the prose tends more towards Martin Amis than Wodehouse. That said, Wodehouse is mentioned by name in the getting-to-know-me third chapter, as Leave It To Psmith is protagonist Paul Reverb’s favourite book, The Smiths his favourite band. So complete a picture do we get of Reverb’s likes and dislikes, it would be understandable to take this as more autobiography. Higgins, outside of the book, has stated this is definitely not the case. But top marks for making it so believable. Reverb is at work on a Young Adult novel about a hypnotist vampire by the name of Count Backwards. Interestingly, this pursuit is not the main focus of the story. Rather we see Paul as he comes to grips with uncomfortable parts of his personality and as he tries to be a better person. It’s just that in doing so, things tend to turn out pretty badly for him. Of course there’s other times where he’s not trying at all. One of the funniest bits in the novel is the ‘Through a glass, Barclay’s’ chapter, about a ‘dedicated wank day’ gone horribly and hilariously wrong. Much more wrong than you could imagine. And that’s not the only time in the novel there’s an issue with the same activity, the next being an incident which has the funniest description of a penis I’ve ever read – “furious and red, like a man arguing with a deckchair attendant”. It’s not all that obscene, though. There’s pop culture references galore throughout, for Paul has, as you might guess, a sizeable record collection and is very fond of film. As often goes hand in hand with these, he’s not so adept in the romance and socializing departments. These matters aren’t always played for laughs, though Higgins’ strong comic touch is never far away. There’s a quite touching funeral scene that nevertheless spawns a few good jokes. And without wishing to give anything away, the twist at the end is handled very well, especially considering how poorly it could have come off. But rather it is proof of Higgins’ talent that the denouement is so pleasing.