Archives

SEASON OF THE RAT: AN INTERVIEW WITH ELIZABETH HALL by Aiden Brown

May 19, 2025

Against the verdant landscape of boarded-up gay bars, bluffs that swell over cresting waves, and hot sand between toes, a haunting, frenetic, and razor-sharp narrative scurries to life in Season of The Rat (Cash 4 Gold Books, 2025). Like the rat, author Elizabeth Hall invites her readers to “taste it all- flowers and cigarettes.” The result is a work which resists definition—part novella, part confession, part dissertation, and part infestation. The reader plays the simultaneous role of voyeur and confidant, observer and observed, the rat in the ceiling and the girl who listens to its scurrying steps below. Season of

CITY DESK by Michael McSweeney

May 14, 2025

Last spring the county newspaper paid me $200 to write about local dreams. I interviewed a man whose job it was to cycle out the books from the little lending library in the center of town. We met at a diner nobody liked and was always empty but stayed in business as such diners often do. He told me he mostly dreamed about colors. Yellow in spring, green in winter, purple in autumn. Summer heat made the man’s legs swell and he didn’t want to talk about what he saw those nights. He seemed uneasy about the approaching season. As

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

A GAME OF GO by RY

May 9, 2025

A miracle had come to the mansion that evening, dressed in peasant robes as she played go on the doorstep. The house of Lord Liu was in desperate need of a blessing. The past month had been disastrous for those staffed within its walls. The change from a serene yet celebratory atmosphere had quickly dulled after one of the maids caught sight of the Lady’s physician leaving her room with a cut over one eye. Surmising that he had said something to anger her, rumors spread over the course of a single night – vines choking the mansion halls, blossoming

PEARL HUNTER by Pablo Baler, translated from Spanish by Slava Faybysh

May 7, 2025

Before getting into bed, Gaspar Santos plopped his dentures into a glass of water. He adjusted himself into a comfortable position between the sheets, sinking into the softened mattress, and eased gently into his sleep. Back in his younger days he had been a pearl hunter, and in the wee hours of night he dreamt he was diving deep in the sea, exposed once again to sharks and fanciful currents. Darkness and silence besieged him, and no matter which way he looked, he could not make out an oyster. All at once he realized he had descended deeper than was

DREAMS OF EXURBIA: AN INTERVIEW WITH DONOVAN REYES by Rebecca Gransden

May 6, 2025

Donovan Reyes’s domain is that of the illuminated store, the lonely places on the outskirts of town, the back rooms of an America in thrall to the failure of its own myth. With denouement (Anxiety Press, 2025) Reyes envisions a peripatetic slumberland, surroundings subject to abstruse moods. Nowhere addicts succumb to an anaesthetised pulse, ensnared by the numb rhythms of a society gone ill on its symptoms. I spoke to Donovan about the book. Rebecca Gransden: Simple place to start, where did denouement begin? It strikes me as a piece that has a lifetime’s worth of backstory and experience

SPRING FORMULA by Tom Snarsky

May 5, 2025

I notice some crocodile cracking near the bend, which is already pitched the wrong way—against the turn, so as a car’s tires point left the road’s normal force pushes it right, recipe for a rollover—and think somebody’s going to get killed. So I go to the municipal office to complain, but no one’s there. BE BACK SOON says the sign. So I grab one of the envelopes and start to write on it, just right on the envelope, my name is Ryan Pendleton I live at 29 Keep Tryst Rd in the Hermitage and someone’s going to get hurt and

Wonder Meadow by David Hayden

May 2, 2025

The night trees were blue by the Wensum. Eels seethed in a ditch. In the flint wall of a garden a door trembled. A green man sat naked on the riverbank, his feet in the water, head nodding, vines and tendrils ran down his chest. A swan guzzled between his legs, blood flowed down his mossy thighs. Twitching and jiggling, burning ropes suspended from the boughs of a hawthorn tree. Across a playing field the cathedral rose, all spire, dissolving sour yellow into the sky, drifting towards the moon. Cakes were scattered in the mud by the Watergate. The girl

TOOTH by Joe Johnson

April 30, 2025

The itch begins in the jawbone under the gums. I can’t get to it with a finger or tongue or backscratcher. Have to let it itch, like watching a fly you can’t swat tickle your forearm. It’s happened before. Happens more these days. Nothing shows up on x-rays, and now dental insurance is all used up. The tooth itches as the boss talks. He’s wearing a suit on casual Friday. It’s gray and fits him in the shoulders but not the belly, so he leaves it unbuttoned. The blue striped tie hangs over his belt. It’s like he’s guest-hosting a

BOWLING WITH DRACULA by Justin Gibson

April 28, 2025

The first thing we discovered was that vampires loved contracts. Well, no, sorry, I guess the first thing we discovered was the vampires themselves — that they’re real. We figured it out pretty quick, as pets went missing; as we started to get the heebie-jeebies when twilight flooded our backyards a cool blue; as pale strangers stood outside our windows in the middle of the night and asked if we’d let them in, voices like warm caramel. Very strange stuff for these parts, but very obvious: That’s vampires. But we figured out vampires loved contracts almost right after that. Erik