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OTTERS AND TIGERS by John Jodzio

August 7, 2025

I work part-time at a dry cleaners, but I’m mostly known for posting cute videos of otters that make people smile. Most people thank me for my work by liking and sharing my videos but some people, like two or three a month, ask me to post videos of otters having sex. When I tell them I don’t post lewd otter content, these people usually say mean things about my penis. For instance, how it’s microscopic. Or how it’s bent like a Russian sickle. Or how it smells like pot roast. If I could brush these comments off I would, but sometimes they really mess with my head and I have to take off my pants and double check my penis is not a tiny pot roast scented sickle.Yesterday I was in the bedroom and my girlfriend, Shelly, caught me trying to get my nose near my penis.“Jesus Christ,” she said. “It doesn’t smell like pot roast, it smells like pennies.”Shelly and I have been together for almost two years, but our relationship hasn’t been going very well lately. Shelly used to work as a bank teller and in her free time she would post cute pics and videos of tigers for the entire world to enjoy, but there were some people, like fifty or sixty every day, who begged to see her naked. For a long time she said no way, but these people were relentless and a week ago she said fine, as long as you pay me $79.99 a month.

***

Today I took a break from otter posting and stood outside Shelly’s office. Her door was shut, but I could hear her chatting with someone named Lawrence. I heard some sultry whispering and then some sexy giggling. Then I heard a bikini top being unstrung and tossed erotically onto the floor. You may wonder how I know what a bikini top landing erotically on hardwood sounds like through a closed door, but like most people I have incredible hearing when I’m super jealous. After her session ended, I knocked on her door. Shelly answered it wearing a tightly cinched robe.“When are you going back to posting tigers?” I asked.“Probably never,” she said.I could tell Shelly was annoyed I’d interrupted her again. Since she’d started her new job, I’d been interrupting her about twenty times a day to tell her how much I loved her or to tell her how beautiful she was.“People really loved your tigers,” I told her.“My tits are my tigers now,” Shelly said, tightening her robe and closing the door.

***

I hadn’t taken Shelly on any dates lately because I was saving up all my money for my leg un-lengthening surgery. I’d gotten leg lengthening surgery a year ago because Shelly wanted to wear heels without towering over me. The surgeons snapped my leg bones and screwed in some titanium rods and after my femurs fused back together I was three inches taller. Unfortunately, a few weeks ago, Shelly got drunk and admitted she loved me more when I was shorter.“I’m sorry,” she said, “but your old personality and your new height just don’t match.”I remembered how when I’d woken up from my original leg lengthening surgery, Shelly and my parents were all standing by the side of my hospital bed. I was pretty out of it, so instead of thanking them for being there, I asked my parents why when I was young and they wanted to have sex my dad threw seventy five cents out into the lawn and told me not to come back inside until I found a dollar.“Jesus Christ,” my dad said, “this again?”Fine, I’d brought this topic up a couple of times before, okay maybe like every time I saw my parents I said something about it, and sure, sure the last time I’d brought it up I had compared the quarters in the lawn to less shiny and less valuable blood diamonds which had made my mom cry because she was really against blood diamonds.“You threw those quarters into the lawn like twice a day,” I said. “Sometimes it was freezing out and that one time I got bit by those fire ants.”“Everyone in our neighborhood did that,” my mom said. “Even Pastor Curt’s kids were out there searching for quarters in their lawn.”“It was bad parenting,” I said. “It was an absolute betrayal of trust.”

***

My blood pressure was rising and my heart monitor started beeping faster and faster. Shelly knew where this was headed, so she pressed the button that controlled my pain medicine about 10 times and I drifted off to sleep before things got any more heated.

***

I met up with my friend Calvin for brunch. I told him how Shelly and I were going through a rough patch. Calvin had been against my original leg lengthening surgery and now he was really against my leg unlengthening surgery.“Your body is a unique tapestry and altering it to fit someone else’s desires is totally fucked,” he said.“Of course,” I told him, “but there’s also nothing in the world that says I love you more than having incredibly painful elective surgery. Everyone knows that it works way better than having a baby to save a relationship.”I told Calvin how I’d bought a wig and some sunglasses and a fake mustache and paid for an individual session with Shelly for later that week.“That’s a horrible idea,” he said.“Maybe what she’s doing isn’t as bad as I think,” I told him. “Maybe it is super innocent. Maybe I’ve got nothing to worry about.”“Maybe what she’s doing is way way worse than you’re imagining,” he told me.

***

I had my session with Shelly later that week. I knew I couldn’t be at our house, so I drove over to the grocery store parking lot and put on my disguise.Shelly came on screen, smiling, wearing a tiger print bikini. Unfortunately I had not cleaned out the back window of my car and all the otter stuffed animals I kept there were visible to her.“Ughh,” she said. “Take off the fucking wig and the stupid mustache. I know it’s you.”“I was just curious what you were doing,” I told her. “I just wanted to talk.”“We’ve talked enough,” she said. “I can’t do this anymore.”I started to plead with her, but she clicked off the session and my screen went black.

***

I drove around for a while and when I got home I saw Shelly had chucked some of my things out onto our yard. I gathered all my clothes and books and threw them into my backseat. Then I sat there in my car and cried while I watched all my favorite otter videos, otters swimming around and splashing each other, otters juggling rocks on their chests, otters chowing down on sardines. When I stopped sobbing, I drove over to my parent’s house to see if I could crash there.When I got there I found my two nephews, Kaden and Karl, on their hands and knees, crawling around in my parent’s lawn.“Grandpa threw five bucks into the grass and told us not to come in until we found it,” Kaden told me.While I stood there Kaden found a quarter, held it up to his brother.“Sweet,” Karl said.The two of them were laughing, they looked happy. I looked at my car, filled with all my belongings and then I got down on my hands and knees and helped them search.

JUST ANOTHER FRIDAY by Stefanie K. Yang

August 6, 2025

When Gary died, nobody mourned—not even his siblings. Everyone agreed he lived like a ghost, practically invisible and emerging only when absolutely necessary. He had no children and accomplished very little. He wouldn’t be missed. Like many before him, Gary simply ceased to exist while time and the universe continued on.Yet, for a brief moment, Gary mattered. Gary was murdered. He was killed in his own home in his own bathtub on a Thursday evening between nine- and ten-o’-clock. The most conspicuous evidence was his severed leg. The killer left it in his bathtub in a shallow pool of water which hadn’t properly drained. Gary’s bronze leg lay in the center of the white basin, knee softly bent and brown hairs floating like drifting seaweed.The rest of his body was discarded in a heavy duty trash bag, which was securely fastened and propped against an overflowing bin beside his mailbox. Friday was trash day. So it was a young trash collector named Manuel who would end up discovering Gary the next morning.

***

At approximately 7:15AM, just as Manuel was emptying bins and a couple of school children were boarding a yellow bus, the trash bag containing Gary split open and all of its contents spilled out, mortifying Manuel when a naked body tumbled out onto his right foot. The children stared with hands pressed against the windows. Stanley the bus driver, who was oblivious to what was happening outside his bus, pulled the lever that closes the door, pressed his foot on the accelerator, and shouted for the kids in the back to sit down. He could not hear over his own voice the sound of Manuel frantically calling for his colleagues on the garbage truck to come and help. Trash collectors were just as invisible as bus drivers. That’s why Stanley always had to shout to be heard. As the bus drove away, the children settled down and started lamenting about the upcoming tests of the week. Most of them hadn’t studied.That Friday was indeed a rough day. The traffic was long, the tests were hard, Gary was dead, and Manuel ended up quitting his job. The discovery of the corpse was the straw that broke Manuel’s back. He never wanted to be a trash collector. It paid better than one would think, which was why he took the job, but the pay was not worth the perception that his work belonged on the bottom rungs of society, somewhere between burger flipper and high school janitor. He would later explain to friends and family that he needed to quit; that they, too, would have done so if they, too, spent day after day driving down the same routes collecting what everyone else wanted to discard. How would they feel, he asked, if the dead occupant of 143 Blattodean Road landed on their feet? Would they tolerate the nauseating scent of decay, of blackened banana peels and moldy coffee grounds, while staring in shock at Gary’s sad state? They’d be ‘grossed’ and ‘freaked out’ and ‘fed up,’ too. No, he decided. Life was too short. Gary would have agreed—when the universe surprises you with an earth-shattering moment, you have to act! You need to take what you can and run, or die without having done anything.Those were the thoughts that crossed Manuel’s mind that morning. After cleaning up the contents of Gary’s trash bag, he climbed back onto the garbage truck and proceeded onwards to house number 141 with plans of submitting his resignation as soon as his shift was over.

***

141 Blattodean Road is the dilapidated bungalow of Mr. and Mrs. Withers. The couple lived in the same house for over a quarter of a century. It was where Mr. and Mrs. Withers once raised their children, but those children eventually grew up and moved away. With their human babies gone, they now devoted their resources to a Miniature Schnauzer, two Persians, and some chickens.Gary hated chickens, cats, and dogs, and the Withers probably hated Gary. It seemed inevitable that they’d be contentious neighbors, but because Gary often kept to himself and never once tried to cross paths with them, they were able to coexist without incident.On the night of Gary’s murder, the Withers were walking past his property with their Mini Schnauz named Percy. All evening, Percy had been pacing—wound up and restless, like he knew something extraordinary was about to happen. He needed a walk. So although the Withers didn’t usually stroll during hours they considered unsafe, the stars were out, the moon was full, and dinner had been indulgent. The rustling leaves outside beckoned them, so they walked their dog. And it was mostly nice. That is, until Percy started barking just steps away from returning home.Mr. Withers hissed, ‘Percy! For Chrissake, quit yer yappin’!’ to which Mrs. Withers asked whatever was the matter with him. ‘The hell I know!’ Mr. Withers replied, ‘He’s your damn dog!’ In times like these, Percy was never Mr. Withers’s dog.Poor Percy. If only he could speak human. If only the two most important people in his world stopped to listen sometimes. They might’ve understood him.‘Someone inside that house is screaming,’ Percy barked. ‘I hear screaming! Someone is screaming! We need to find out what’s causing that screaming!’‘I don’t understand what’s wrong with him these days,’ Mrs. Withers sighed as she watched her husband tug at Percy’s leash. ‘Maybe he’s getting senile.’Mr. Withers grumbled. He was hating the incessant barking, but he hated the idea of their dog developing dementia even more. Then as if remembering—‘What day is it today?’ And as if his wife could read his mind—‘Did you take the trash out? Tomorrow’s trash day.’Mr. Withers scowled. When he wasn’t able to calm Percy, he reached down, scooped the dog into his arm, and marched the rest of the way home. His wife followed suit, stopping briefly at her front porch to glance at the shadowy movements behind her neighbor’s drawn curtains. The wind rustled the leaves. Mrs. Withers hugged her arms for warmth, then went inside. She needed to make sure her husband hadn’t forgotten the trash again.

***

For the rest of that night, Blattodean Road was quiet. The Withers got their dog under control and the killer proceeded to kill Gary, emerging two hours later with a trash bag containing his stiffened corpse. The bag would sit all night against the curbside in wait for an unassuming trash collector named Manuel, who couldn’t have imagined that in just a few short moments, he would be shaken to his core at what would land on his shoe.But in the grand scheme of things, none of it would matter. Gary dies. Nobody cares. It’s just another Friday.And the woman who killed him with a broom slept through most of it on Gary’s bed, hungover from a night of wine and phone calls about what she had totally—like, ewww—done, and dreaming about a tussle in the tub and striking something over and over again.

CHRISTOPHER ZEISCHEGG’S ‘THE MAGICIAN’ reviewed by Chloe Pingeon

August 5, 2025

There is a nightmarish quality to Christopher Zeischegg’s The Magician. I read the book twice, the first time through the haze of an all nighter—sleep deprivation and sleep paralysis hastening my descent into the blur of self destruction and bodily decay that the narrative presents. “Just a thing inside your body that won’t listen to your head,” a malignant acquaintance tells the narrator early in the novel, as a prescription of sorts for the root of all his problems. At dawn, this rings true. This distance between body and self, judgment and subconscious, good and evil, is perhaps the root of all that is hellish.The Magician was originally published in 2020 by indie press Amphetamine Sulphate but had, until recently, fallen out of circulation. The edition of The Magician that I read is a reissue, recently published by Apocalypse Party Press in November 2024 with an added introduction by author and artist Chris Kelso, and a new cover by Christopher Norris. Zeischegg intended for the novel to be consumed as a triptych, accompanied by a short film and an art book, but these are unavailable to me, and so the novel stands alone, a highly corporeal narrative speaking for itself without visual supplement. In The Magician, Christopher Zeischegg, a fictional protagonist who shares the author's name, lurches through California in a hallucinatory descent into horror, gore, torture, and the occult. Christopher, in his early thirties, is a former porn star (he shares the author’s former adult film alias of Danny Wylde) who has left the industry after abusing performance drugs, and is now embroiled in an unsalvageable relationship with his drug addicted and deeply suicidal girlfriend Andrea. The novel opens with Andrea’s latest suicide attempt, the first line of the novel echoing text on the back cover, seemingly intent on provoking the reader into intrigue and/or horror for what is in store—“Andrea’s gore was dark red, nearly brown, and smelled of meat and piss. She must have wet herself on account of the drugs…”There is little value in a book that seeks only to shock, and in its self identification, The Magician seems to dare the reader to draw this immediate conclusion. Zeischegg is a former porn star, the novel is auto fiction and body horror and it places itself in Los Angeles, in the porn industry, in a land of devil worship and torture and addiction. The reissue of the novel comes only four years after the original publication, but those four years have been formative for the collective understanding of autofiction, for the Literary Thrill-Seeking Industrial Complex, for Bret Easton Ellis and his imitators, for the contrarian, the provocateur, for autofiction often that is now a*tofiction because this author is ironic, this author realizes that our absorption with ourselves is becoming a bit obscene. There is admitted sensationalism in the very names of those championing Zeischegg’s work: “Amphetamine Sulphate” and “Apocalypse Party Press”, the latter of which comes with some warnings of its own: “Anyone with an open mind is welcome to join the party” “Once the void swallows you whole, you'll never be the same.”Still, beyond those first few pages, it becomes clear that The Magician is more than just a challenge for the daring. At what Christopher refers to as an Alcoholics-Lovers Anonymous (AL-Anon) meeting, he runs into Jayla, another porn star who he filmed with in the past. She attacks him with pepper spray and harvests his blood for Satanic supernatural purposes. This, of course, sets off a downward spiral of torture, violence that remains Christopher’s seemingly only consistent tether to reality, and a throughline for the novel. The Magician contrasts searing physical pain with a dissociated gaze and occasional poignant descriptions of the mountains on the horizon of the Los Angeles night sky. We follow Christopher pining for Andrea, gasping for air in a body bag by the LA River, and then desperate to expel the demons that are destroying himself and his family whilst seeking refuge in his deeply religious mother’s home. As his problems scale towards the cosmic and the supernatural, the seemingly sensational opening lines become points of almost absurdist inconsequentiality. Suicide and addiction, as it turns out, are luxury problems amidst a reckoning with the occult. Autofiction can bore in its needlessly self referential nature, but The Magician deals more in the realm of the alter ego. Noir can falter in a didactic rendering of good and evil, but there is a banality to the way the narrative swallows and stomachs the ever-worsening horror of the world it exists within, which lends itself almost to absurdity. Zeischegg has described the novel as a parallel to the years following his own departure from the porn industry, and yet The Magician does not deal heavily in metaphor. Christopher, for all his drifting, disassociated, tendencies, is a reliable narrator. One never suspects that his hallucinatory recollections are, in actuality, hallucinations. One never suspects that the demon clawing at his stomach is a stand-in for something more abstract. The gashes on his stomach are real, as is his mother’s graying skin and progressing illness in the company of Christopher and his demon; as is the instant resurrection of order when—with the help of a full moon, hen’s blood and the wood from a cypress tree—he is able to expel the demon. There are moments of body horror throughout the novel that make me reflexively gag, but for the most part, reading The Magician is a steady experience. The banality of evil is established, enforced, and then reinforced again and again and again. You have entered into some realm of darkness. The rules are different here. Christopher, intuitively, seems to grasp this immediately. He does what he can to survive. His suffering, at least, serves as a reminder that he is real. The novel begins with Christopher insistent on his normalcy. At an AL-Anon meeting he tunes into another young man’s speech because “he was young and vibrant and I could imagine us being friends” He does not identify with the freaks, and strikingly, he does nothing very wrong to become one. The narrative, while cohesive, is driven by whim and bad luck. Christopher becomes who he is because he is chosen as a host for this demon. The rest of it, and even this circumstance in and of itself, is left up to chance. The Magician ends not too far from how it began. After ridding himself of his demon, Christopher is normal, gaining weight, aging, still in his mother’s home and now, a bit discontent. “I used to be a porn star,” he tells a young woman after she refers to him as a “fat fuck”. Finally free from his own demon, he has attended a party with a local magician who he hopes might teach him his ways. It happens that this magician got here mostly by a stroke of desperate luck—he stumbled upon a Magick book in the woods after shooting himself in the head. And as it turns out, after escaping torture of the supernatural scale, Christopher is now bored.“I was someone who had bent the world to my will,” Christopher insists in the novel’s final pages. This identification with self autonomy is in sharp contrast to the passivity that defines him throughout the book, and yet he speaks with sincerity. He has mistaken adjacency to a power that beheld him with agency over a power he could never really harness. The Magician moralizes nothing. There are no clear conclusions as to where the novel’s dreamscape intersects with auto-fictional reality. Still, if there is a conclusion outside of the vacuum world into which The Magician sucks readers, it lies here. From dust to dust, and from mundane to mundane. Zeischegg speaks to the alter egos which we craft, suffer with, and live in along the way.

BIG STEVE HID WATER BOTTLES OF PISS BENEATH HIS BED by Matti Ben-Lev

August 4, 2025

He was used to being homeless. He was used to sleeping in his car in Philly parking lots. Once, he picked up a Tinder date, drove her 3 hours from Baltimore to Philly, rode around looking for his ex-girlfriend, didn’t find her, and only told his date the truth about his ex and why they drove to Philly on the car ride back. I don’t remember how she responded, but I think they went out a few more times.Big Steve unrolled cigarettes, made a bong out of a water bottle and a pen, hit tobacco out the window of the rehab we were in together. Our rehab used the ‘confrontational model,’ which is just as bad as it sounds—the whip-you-into-shape model—and held super-groups where we verbally hammered someone when they were fucking up. Big Steve always roasted people a little harder than everyone else did. He always hugged the victim extra-tight afterwards. We called Big Steve Big Steve because he was big (300 lbs, 6 foot 4), and we had 3 Steves in rehab. When I hugged him, I thought he might absorb me. One time I took a run at him and he didn't budge, as if fixed to the concrete curb outside that shitty rehab. We called middle Steve Average Steve and he asked us to stop because he'd been called average his whole life and of course we didn't stop and the whole community got super-grouped for that one. Little Steve was the littlest, but he’s not really relevant. When we switched to outpatient, I came out to Big Steve as bi, one of first people I told, and he took a large slurp from his water bottle and said, Who isn’t a little gay, told me he fucked his bestfriend, Slush, and their friendship wasn’t the same after that. His eyes started watering and he tilted his head back into the ash-stained seat of his beat-to-shit pickup truck and lifted his left shoe to show me the name SLUSH written across his heel in layers and layers of black Sharpie, and he started crying harder, moans fogging up his blotchy November windows, and he told me he got Slush hooked on dope, that he gave Slush the hit that killed him, that he was nodded out beside Slush, that he woke up in a slick of chunky yellow bile and Slush was no longer breathing.Big Steve got super-grouped for hiding piss under his bed. Big Steve got super-grouped for carving ANAL into the brand new couch cushions in our rehab’s group room. Eventually, he got booted out of treatment. It's a shame he never got super-grouped for showing back up to treatment high. Before we got the chance, he left rehab against medical advice and shot dope and overdosed and up and died and I’m ashamed to say I still think about how much fun we all would have had roasting him and I’m ashamed to say I still think about his piss when I hear an empty Aquafina water bottle crinkle.

CAUSE AND EFFECT by Claire Hanlon

July 31, 2025

When the birds burst up and out from the sidewalk grass in front of my car as I’m driving home from the store on Mother’s Day, and I think: how beautiful! as the unexpected blue of their wings flash before me, and then: oh no! did I hit them?—it’s a near thing, a miracle: I miss them, just. Because the birds live, when I arrive home and honk to let my family know I’m back, let’s go, and my husband emerges, he does not stare perplexedly at the bumper of our newly-purchased SUV. And, because the birds are both still winging through the clear May sky, I do not slide out of the driver’s seat and find a dead bluebird resting like a macabre figurehead just above my Texas license plate. I do not marvel at its tiny twisted legs. One splayed skyward. Reaching. My son doesn’t nudge it with a stick so it falls glittering to the concrete of our driveway, a jewel torn from the crown of heaven. Let’s keep it, I don’t say, so my husband doesn’t have to shoot me that look both disgusted and affectionate like: you’re such a weirdo and I love you, but absolutely not, no way, dead songbird in the freezer is where I draw the line. The bird is still alive so I can't take a picture and post it, like an omen, on Instagram. So, because I don’t kill this bird on Mother’s Day, the universe does not decide, a month later, that four and a half weeks of pregnancy is all I get. No, the bird flies free and this baby—the one I don’t know I want until I see the pink parallel lines and feel a yes so deep it rings like a bell? This baby lives.

PRAYER BREAKFAST by Emma Ensley

July 30, 2025

I knew that downloading music was illegal, but my dad was the one who showed me how to do it, so I didn’t worry too much. I still prayed at night for God to forgive me, just in case.

***

The Australian's username was koala_rocks47 and he was thirty-two, though I didn't know that yet.I was eleven and three-quarters. I'd found the John Mayer fan forum through a Google search after Drew read the lyrics to "Why Georgia" in Literature class, during our poetry unit."am I living it right?" over and over again, while his hands shook.I wasn't living at all, not really. Not until I heard that song.

***

koala_rocks47: hey Why_GeorgiaGurl! saw ur post about wanting the Melbourne bootleg. I've got the whole show, soundboard quality. want me to upload it for you?Why_GeorgiaGurl: omg yes please!!! I only have the first 4 songs from limewire and they keep cutting outkoala_rocks47: no worries, mate. us hardcore fans gotta stick together. btw love your username - georgia's my favorite track too. how old are you?Why_GeorgiaGurl: 16

***

On Wednesday mornings, Pastor Jim drove the Presbyterian middle schoolers to Bojangles on Cleveland Highway. We called it Prayer Breakfast. At Bojangles I would order a cinnamon biscuit, a buttered biscuit, and a Mr. Pibb. I’d watch Drew across the restaurant while Jim asked us about our “faith journeys.” “Anyone want to share what God's been doing in their lives this week?”I could’ve shared that I'd stayed up until 3 AM downloading bootlegs with someone named koala_rocks47, who thinks I am in high school. Instead, I said nothing and watched Drew's headphones settle around his neck, wondering what holy music played through them.Last week on the bus, his batteries died and he asked to share mine. We listened to a live John Mayer show from Melbourne together. During “Comfortable” our arms touched and stayed touching for three whole songs.“Where do you find all these?” he asked.“The internet,” I said.

***

The next Wednesday his batteries worked but he asked to share headphones anyway. This time he played me Damien Rice and said "this will make you cry" and I pretended it did even though I was mostly thinking about how to make our arms touch again.

***

On the forum, I tell people I've been to twelve John Mayer concerts. I say my favorite was Atlanta because that's the closest city people would recognize. I talk about the acoustics at the Fox Theatre even though I've only seen pictures online. koala_rocks47: which was your favorite show of all the ones you've been to?Why_GeorgiaGurl: probably the one at eddie's attic. he played this unreleased song called “in your atmosphere” and everyone was dead silentI downloaded another bootleg. Hartford, 2002. The crowd noise sounded like prayers or waves or static between radio stations.

***

I burned Drew a mix CD and almost called it “Songs for Bojangles” but at the last second I wrote “Songs for Wednesday Mornings”. I included the Melbourne "Why Georgia," some Damien Rice, and other songs I thought sounded appropriately deep and romantic. Songs about longing and roads and being older than we were.

***

koala_rocks47: what's winter like there?In Georgia, winter meant maybe putting on a fleece. Maybe frost on car windows that melted by 9 AM. In Brisbane it was summer. Upside-down seasons.Why_GeorgiaGurl: cold sometimesI opened a new browser and googled the distance between Brisbane and Atlanta which was 9,272 miles.

***

Drew's mix CD got scratched. The Damien Rice track skipped on “still a little bit” over and over.“Still a little bit still a little bit still a little…”

***

That night I prayed. “Dear God, forgive me for lying about my age. And for downloading. And for the way I feel when Drew's arm touches mine during 'Comfortable.’”

***

Some girls hang out in Pastor Jim's office after school, taking photos on flip phones and listening to emo music that almost sounds like worship songs. I don't go because I don't get asked but also because when I mentioned it to my mom she furrowed her brow and said "I don't know about that."I rolled my eyes and told her it was perfectly fine and she said that it didn’t matter. That it was a bad look. I mentioned this to Drew, like can you believe this, and he kind of shrugged. He said, “I mean yeah, he never has the guys in his office.”

***

I asked koala_rox47 if he believed in God and he typed for a really long time before just saying “no”.

***

At Prayer Breakfast, Pastor Jim always sat next to whoever was newest. This week it was Anna from sixth grade. He asked her about her "walk with Christ" while his hand rested on her back.My Mr. Pibb tasted flat. I couldn’t finish my second biscuit. When Drew played me an unreleased Damien Rice song on the bus, I could barely pay attention to the words. I stared out the window watching the cars fly past us on Cleveland Highway and letting my mind go blank.

***

My mom asked me again about Pastor Jim and I said I hadn’t noticed anything. She stared at me for a long time. I added this to my list of lies needing forgiveness.

***

koala_rocks47 messaged me less and less. Or was it me who was messaging him less and less?

***

I started praying with just the beginnings. Dear God, Dear God, Dear God, Dear God, Dear God, Dear God, Dear God, Dear God.

HAUNT ATTACK: DENNIS COOPER AND ZAC FARLEY ON ‘ROOM TEMPERATURE’ by Jack Skelley

July 29, 2025

Room Temperature is the latest film collaboration by Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley. It focuses on a family-run, amateur haunted house and was shot on location in Southern California. The film recently screened at San Francisco’s Frameline film festival, and before that at Los Angeles Festival of Movies. It will soon show in Europe. Although the concept of co-directing a film is unusual, the rapport between Cooper and Farley is natural… as evidenced by how they often finish each other’s thoughts in this QA with Jack Skelley. And this reflects in the quietly supernatural vibe of Room Temperature, which is spare and cool, but with deep emotional undercurrents. Jack: Can you describe the division of labor between the two of you? Dennis, one would assume that you’re responsible for the script and Zac is more responsible for directing camera angles, blocking, and those kinds of things. Is that true?Dennis: I’m not completely responsible for the text. I do the vast majority of that work, but everything is in consultation with Zac. He has lots of ideas that I can’t implement textually because I’m not as visually inclined as he is. But we talk about everything. And we’re so in sync about what we want that I trust him. Occasionally, I do question some visual decisions, but on the set, Zac is directing and I’m mostly there working with the actors and conferring with Zac. But as it’s being written, I’m basically the guy at the computer.Zac: The films are complete collaborations. We decide what we want to do and how to do it together. Neither Dennis nor I are classically trained filmmakers, so I guess neither one of us really knows how other directors make their films, but our collaborations feel both more complex and fluid than one does words and the other makes images. But yes, Dennis is a writer, a really great one, so I know better than to mess with his intuitions on that front. But we make all the decisions together. We do the casting together, for example.Dennis: And decisions about choosing locations are all completely mutual. But he is stronger in that area. So it divides up a little bit, but it’s always a back-and-forth.Jack: How often do these decisions happen on the set, in real time?Dennis: Oh, quite a lot.Zac: The goal on set is to be really attuned and responsive to what’s going on. We plan meticulously ahead of time so that we can feel free to react to a change in circumstances outside our control and to embrace happy accidents. There’s nothing more thrilling than something unexpected happening on set that supersedes our expectations, and to a certain extent we bet on and hope for happy accidents as part of the process. Both Dennis and I are particularly excited with working with the performers. Because we’re working mostly with non-professional actors, we cast people for what they can bring to the projects and welcome their own senses of intuition and insights into their characters. The film is really the result of a collaboration with the cast and crew that participated in bringing it to life. Dennis: When we’re shooting, it’s very common that a line we thought would work isn’t working. So we’ll cut the line or change the words. The same is true with the visuals: Yes, the films are storyboarded. But on set, we’ll realize a scene will be better if we change the POV.Jack: It was very interesting to compare the screenplay with the final product. A lot of dialog was cut. Now, having two directors is fairly unusual, right? Are there any models for this sort of dual relationship?Dennis: Well, there are the Coen brothers, Straub-Huillet, the Wachowskis … It’s not completely unprecedented. There’s never any confusion about that: We know what the other is capable of, and often one of us will back off and let the other person do what they need to do.Jack: Both of you are based in Paris, while Room Temperature was filmed in Southern California. It seems like a lot of effort to pick-up and relocate from your home base to California to do this.Dennis: We just set up camp at my Los Angeles apartment. We have the advantage of knowing a lot of people in Los Angeles. All kinds of friends to lean on. Our casting director Erin Cassidy and our main on-the-ground producer Luka Fisher for example, were based there. Zac: We made our two previous films in France, which was wonderful in that we could finance them in part with public grants. But to be eligible the films have to be shot in majority in the French language. Early on, we tried making Room Temperature in France, but it quickly became clear that this had to be shot in the United States and in English. Home-haunts unfortunately don’t yet exist in France, and while we had always envisioned Permanent Green Light (our previous film) as a French film, we wrote this one in a way where translating it into French would have done real damage. It was a challenge to shoot the film in the United States, but it was absolutely the right thing to do and we got to collaborate with some incredibly talented people. Jack: The collaboration between you is unusual and often feels seamless: The dialog is lean and punctuated by pregnant pauses. So is the visual framing with its own kinds of pauses. There are long, wide shots and slow pans. In this way, the film says more by saying less. Thoughts?Dennis: We have a really strong sense of the rhythm we want the film to have and how that will work. The dialogue is spare, but it has a lot of weight on its shoulders and the visuals are as important as the dialogue. Some of our favorite filmmakers such as James Benning make films with almost no dialogue to provide breathing room. Our films are poetic and formally surprising, but they provide time for the audience to settle-in to the pacing and commune with the characters.Zac: In a way, the rhythm and the pacing act as the glue that allows us to have sometimes wildly divergent tones coexist in the film. In a weird way while the film can feel somewhat slow at times, it’s actually incredibly dense.Dennis: This approach worked well with our Southern California desert location. It’s shot in the middle of nowhere with a family who is very isolated. They don’t have cameras or cell phones or computers, as far as we know. Not even a car. They live in a very closed-off world. So having all that space and silence reinforces the emptiness of the world they live in.Jack: Let’s talk about the differences between writing on the page and screenwriting: Writing on the page depends on the reader to provide some interpretation of the text’s dialog and imagery, while film, being more concrete and visual, presents the image more straightforwardly and the viewer is a less “active” participant in the experience as a work of art. Do you agree with how I pose this?Dennis: Yes, that’s obviously the way I think about writing. The novels don’t create such a solid world that the readers feel like they’re just an observer, right? They participate. And what’s interesting about film is it’s the exact opposite. Because the film is very solid, it does take all the responsibility. We try to open that up, so that the film is obviously a carefully made object, but at the same time it feels very translucent. It’s not so locked down that the audience is casually observing. They have to pay a lot of attention. We just saw the new Wes Anderson film. I love his films, but they are the most extremely fascistically visualized films. There’s no way our films are so completely locked up. But I feel a certain kinship with what he does. We do angle for images and shots that are very highly composed. So it’s weird.Jack: What is the origin of Room Temperature’s setting of a family-made haunted house? Dennis, knowing your obsession with neighborhood haunted houses, it must come from you. You even make Halloween pilgrimages to Southern California to visit many haunted houses.Dennis: Both of us are massive fans of them, and we think of it as an art form. On the surface level it’s just a family having fun and trying to do something cool and make their haunted house better than the neighbors’. But they put so much effort into something that is always a failure on some level… because they don’t have enough funds or because it’s just them and their kids playing with the concept of a haunted house. I love the amateurism of that. All of our films so far have been about people who can’t achieve what they want to achieve. We tried to capture that in this case using the setting of a haunted house whose aspirations are higher than the family’s imaginations and budget can realize.Zac: Yeah. It’s a shared fantasy that the characters have. But it’s also the individual fantasy of each family member. One kid will be really into the acting and theatrical part of it, while another member of the family will be into the architecture and fog machines. In terms of narrative structure, home-haunts are daring and experimental by default. You enter the first room and there’s a pretty classic introduction video explaining the premise of the haunt, but then you go walk into the second room and somebody was obviously just really obsessed with the animatronic ghoul they saw at the Halloween store, so they bought five and decided to operate them out of synch, and it doesn’t really fit with the surface logic of the haunted house, but the conflagration of the two is really generative. The visitor going through this haunted house can project narrative meaning onto something that wasn’t necessarily built to accommodate it, at least not in any literal way, and that creates the kind of openness that we’re seeking to have in our films. Haunted houses are like films in that they use acting, writing, music, architecture... In Room Temperature the house is a setting and a character, but it’s also a kind of analog for the film. Jack: In fact, there’s much discussion among the characters about whether the haunted house is succeeding. One of the first lines in the film is an outside character asking, “What’s wrong with your house!”Dennis: Then he says, “I’m not against it.”Jack This seems like a statement on not just the artistic abilities of the families. It’s an observation that can extend to the father character, who is like the creative director. And there’s definitely something very “wrong” with him. Now, in addition to haunted houses, you two share an obsession with theme parks. Symbolically, thematically, what connects these two art forms?Dennis: In a dark ride, the experience is out of your control. The car is devising your pace and each passenger sees exactly the same thing. Whereas in a haunted house you can hang around or go look at details that intrigue you. It’s not like everybody’s constantly being propelled forward, but there is a unifying quality that makes it a haunted house. You know, the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland in California is not completely dissimilar. In an earlier version of our script there was a point where people got in a little car and experienced a section of the house that way. It was impractical and overly expensive to realize, but we were very excited by that concept.Zac: There used to be a haunted house called Mystic Motel that had a ride-through component. It was created by a 14- or 15-year-old kid who was obviously very ambitious and excited about the mechanics of dark rides. He used one of those electrified shopping carts designed for disabled people to navigate giant grocery stores. He had it follow a track in his basement and built a remote-control system so he could decide when it would stop and go, controlling your rhythm. Dennis: Some of the big cities in Europe, such as London or Amsterdam, have the London Dungeon or the Amsterdam Dungeon. That’s kind of a combo because you walk through it, and it’s obviously much more professional than a family haunted house. For instance, in the Amsterdam Dungeon, at the end you get on a roller coaster that takes you through the final section of experience.Jack: Dennis, you are familiar with Sabrina Tarasoff’s concept for her “Beyond Baroque” walk-through haunted house – in the “Made in L.A. 2020” biennial at the Huntington Museum in Los Angeles. It focused on your writing and mine and others from 1980s Los Angeles. And originally it was to be a dark ride. Sabrina wanted something close to what you were saying, Zac, where you get in a little car that follows a track. And later, she and I wrote a piece for your blog, Dennis, about theme parks where we discuss Disney’s invention of the Omnimover: a shell-like, encased ride vehicle that directs your experience. This is unlike, say, dark rides such as Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride where you can look all around. The Omnimover points and targets your vision and experience.Dennis: The Haunted Mansion uses those, right?Jack: Yes. They are named Doom Buggies. Now Disney and other theme parks have more sophisticated versions of this. I don’t know where I’m going with this question: I just want to use the word “Omnimover!”Zac: It’s a really good word.Jack: So, what are your feelings in retrospect about making Room Temperature?Dennis: It was an absolute and utter joy to make. Yes, it was exhausting. Sometimes on the set you were going until 5 o’clock in the morning. And it was often freezing cold. But we’re both very happy with the film. It’s not unlike what we hoped it would be when we wrote it. And the editing was a joy.Zac: Every time Dennis and I start a project, we set the level of ambition to a high point which we may or may not be able to achieve. This was much more ambitious than our previous films. And it was harder to produce for those reasons. But I think we managed to do what we set out to do.Jack: Another exciting yet subdued component of Room Temperature is the music. It is even more spare than the dialog. It appears only in very rare scenes. Who is the composer?Dennis: The music is by Puce Mary. In fact, the only pieces of music in Room Temperature are the sounds of the haunted house, created by Puce Mary, plus one song the character Andre (played by Charlie Nelson Jacobs) sings as part of the action. There is no music in the film other than that one song, the haunted house soundscapes by Puce Mary, and the end credits music.Zac: Dennis and I have been huge fans and admirers of Puce Mary forever. We have seen her perform live several times. She was our first collaborator on this film. She started drafting pieces of music – including the ghost sounds – maybe six years before we shot a single image. The song performed by Andre in the middle of the film is written and composed by Chris Olsen, who plays Paul the janitor. And the end credits music is a piece titled “Angel Shaving (L.A.S.E.R.)” by 7038634357, a really brilliant musician. Dennis: It’s important to our films that we don’t use music unless the characters hear the music as part of the action. That’s why there’s not a lot of music in them. It’s not because we don’t like music. We just believe scores are often manipulative. We are not going to dress-up the experience to make it more dramatic or sad or weird than it actually is for the characters.Jack: This certainly fits the vibe of the film. What’s next? Is there another collaboration in the works?Dennis: We are writing our next film right now. We have a meeting about it tomorrow. Jack: Yeah?Dennis: Yeah, and it’s good!

FOREVER by Spencer Lee

July 25, 2025

I’m sitting at the pool with the boys, listening to the gardener trim the hedges. The world right now is loud and whirring. When the gauze comes off, everything will be graceful and good. My surgeon’s a short man with steroid face–large, skeletal nostrils–but he has great taste in women’s faces. My face feels taut and ready for anything. Underneath the bandages, I swear that I’m smiling down at the boys. I lower my feet into the lukewarm water. The sun is injecting undulating crystals of white that look like ominous little spirits. Or Xanaxs. I wonder what my husband’s doing at work, likely sitting somewhere too: at a desk, a toilet. The boys are yelling, splashing each other, crying out. I get up and towel off my feet, before alerting the nanny to go make them a snack. Heading upstairs to reapply SPF to my limbs, I swallow myself up in the blunt white surfaces of my house. Avoiding the sun makes me feel a little purer, like I’m a kidnapped woman. Peace, quiet, and skincare.The gardener moves right under my window, whirring underneath me. I hear him stumble. The trimmer turns off, and he’s singing to himself. I think to myself that he must be drunk. Last month, there was an incident at the country club. I overheard ladies talking about it at the smoothie bar–a worker killed himself, accidentally, in some sort of construction accident, some sort of falling or impaling or crushing. One of the ladies said that she thought he was probably drunk, and that alcoholism is a disease and it is more omnipresent than we think. Her friends were not necessarily having it, so I went over and agreed with her. It’s actually an area of vulnerability for me. The hedge trimmer turns back on as I lay myself down onto my bed, bunions hurting. Against my will, I think of my parents' liquor cabinet, the largest one you’d ever seen, with the wood sanded down where it rubbed together on opening or slamming shut. I close my eyes and laugh to myself, pop an Ativan for the pain. I look inward. I let myself recount the story of my life through identities: plain schoolgirl, shy debutante, wife, Hollywood actress, wife again, mother. And then I think about my little sports-stars, little Nikes on, splashing away in the pool, and I think about the scalpel that nicked their heads during my C-section. The nanny raises her voice out the window–and I’m reminded of last week, when I got a call from the boys’ teacher, Miss Pappajohn. She had a lot to say. They don’t listen, they don’t relax. They’re doing things. To other kids, to small animals. They’re headstrong, they’re troubled, they’re suspended. When I look at the boys, all I see is a curious innocence. I have the wisdom to know that everything that they do wrong comes from the innocence of not knowing between right and wrong. But of course Miss Pappajohn can’t see that. She’s the one who creeps me out. She’s about my age and I haven’t heard her ever mention a family, or friends. She’s rude, always emailing at odd hours. I can tell her hair has never touched a lick of conditioner. Sometimes, Miss Pappajohn’s face pops up when I see chicken skin at the grocery store. I feel bad for the boys. They have to sit and watch her all day. I bet she keeps whiskey and limes in her dusty little desk drawer. She’s not a good girl. My boys are the innocent ones. Which is funny because of my thought, just now, that I was never really innocent–certainly not as an actress, no matter how approachable and commercial I was always told I looked. You know, that girl-next-door face can be stifling, especially when you’re sitting at home in your own living room and an agent comes by and tells you that you are actually next-door. But that’s what they want. And that’s why I got popular. They don’t want character actresses. They want you to be relatable. But now I’m not. I’m not that innocent girl. Yesterday, I went into my husband’s home office and shredded the letter I got from my mother. The stationary had these cartoon drawings of plump strawberries and yellow happy faces. She was asking for money, I think. She was not innocent either. At the present moment, I have a hard time seeing my parents’ faces; their disapproving features are dwarfed by our distance in space, in time. The mom was short and the dad was tall. Not rich, not poor. They hated me for leaving. I can only imagine them in motion, in fuzzy nonexistent home videos. They’re eating large ears of corn in these home videos. The corn gets in the way of precise detail. I saw on Instagram that hurt people hurt people. I thought it was stupid at first. But lying here alone, I don’t feel like I’m the real cause of anything bad. I guess maybe I can be innocent if I think hard enough. Everyone can be. All the men, too, even. Silent rooms filled with them, black bow ties and woody cologne. That’s not even what they wore or smelled like, but it’s how I picture them.#MeToo has supposedly changed the industry. Now, it’s young men who have to watch out for the gay power-players. I was glad to take this work hiatus to gather my bearings, get in touch with myself, with truth, and now even with my own innocence. Maybe I’m a good girl with good bones when it comes down to it. I notice a pinstripe of sunlight feeling up the walls, then, I watch it disappear as I close the gap in the curtains. The gardener looks up mysteriously at me as I do it. I know I need to deal with him. Suddenly, footsteps. I turn around. “Mommy?” the boys ask. They’ve padded behind me to my room, dripping all over the floors like twin slugs. “Hello,” I reply, slipping the little orange bottle from my palm to my bathrobe pocket.“He’s mad at you.” One points to the other. “Mad?” “He doesn’t want your face to change. He wants you to stay the same and never die.”“Oh, sweetie,” I look at the boys, who are both averting eye contact. “Me too. This is all to make sure that I look the same forever.” The boys liven up, imagining this world I’ve created where mothers don’t age. Smiling, they say that they’ll stop eating so they can never age too. I smile back. Their minds are cute little uncooked hamburgers that only I know how to handle correctly. They’ve known me to get Botox before, and they always hate it because I look different. I’ve misled them in my way, but that’s what mothers are there to do: keep up the illusion of Santa, of no ‘bad guys’ who come out in the night, of a world that’s going to keep running smoothly for the next 100 years, just for them. What they don’t know is that I have to do it. What they don’t know is that looking different can sometimes be the only way to stay the same. If I posture just right, I can make it seem like I always looked like this. Because my new face isn’t stalling for anyone, not even the boys. My new face will not be plain, because plainness invites people to think that you are just like them, when you are not. My new face will not be aged, because looking in the mirror at a wrinkly face fishes out the bloated, drowned corpse of the past and turns it over into the future, which you also do not want. It’ll be that unique kind of beauty that you can’t forget. Which is to say that I will look fake.I’m finally ready to admit that I’ve always been fake. That’s what people don’t get–I’ve always been fake. Things roll off of me. I’ve schemed my way through life. And I’ve proudly worn blinders, because seeing everything in great detail makes everything strange and sad. I don’t want to be sad. But it's all okay now. This new face will let me rest my heavy little mind. It'll get me in touch with innocence. I’ll be on the outside what I’ve always felt like on the inside and it will be my repentance. Lately, I’ve been even considering trying my hand at acting again. This time, I could really disappear—line by line, frame by frame, into a good role. Be ruined and dramatic for a bit. Cry and beg for my babies back. Give a real smile when they do come back. No more Hallmark. I take the boys back downstairs. The gardener is packing up–and a strange feeling that I could have been unaware of something makes me nervous, realizing that something curious about this image does not come together correctly. I’m shocked to feel as though I’m sinking and the world around me is enlarging like a bright ballooning tumour. I gather myself. I approach the gardener, ask if he needs anything–water, a snack. While he answers, I inspect his face for puffiness, yellowing, and I inspect his eyes, too, for wandering. He looks back at me, blankly, as I take my time. He looks fine. I’m glad to see it. Now, I don’t have to do anything anymore. I don’t want to. So, I’m sitting at the pool with the boys, watching the gardener exit stage left. The sun is shining. The boys are screaming, with joy, and the adhesive under my bandages has never felt so tight and secure. Emboldened, I raise my face to the sun in satisfaction. My life is intact and good.

SWIMMERS by Tobi Pledger

July 24, 2025

Doc Raeford lifted the tail and stepped back to avoid the torrent of steaming bull shit. After the last wink of the bull’s anus, he leaned forward and pushed the electroejaculator probe into the rectum, completing the docking maneuver.“Bull’s eye.” Mike would never have imagined that he’d enjoy helping a veterinarian anally penetrate a two-thousand-pound Angus bull, but he did.Raeford shrugged. “It’s a gift.”The bull resisted the intrusion, lunging forward, shoving his chest against the gate of the squeeze chute with a jolt. His nostrils flared, flecks of foamy mucus blowing out on the exhale. The Texas sun heated the black hide, releasing its animal scent.“How’s your wife?” Mike asked.“Good. She’s meeting her sister for a spa day. They’re doing goat yoga, then getting massaged with hot rocks.”“I’ve heard of the down dog, but not—”“This isn’t a position. It’s baby goats standing on your back. Supposed to be relaxing.”Raeford flicked the switch and the bull froze, legs locked straight, the only movement a twitch of skin over his shoulders.“Have you hired a new assistant for the clinic yet?” Sweat dripped from Mike’s chin onto the front of his khaki twill prison-issue shirt. He watched Raeford out of the corner of his eye.The bull sucked breath into his massive lungs and held it for almost five seconds, before releasing it in a snort as his abdominal muscles spasmed, and he ejaculated. Mike was right there with the collection tube.“Yep. He’s starting next week.” “Oh.” Mike tasted something metallic, bitter as an unripened persimmon. “Good deal.” It had been stupid to hope for anything different.Raeford pulled the ejaculator probe out of the bull. Mike removed the loving cup from the end of the collection tube and placed it carefully on the workbench.After pipetting a drop of semen onto a glass slide and studying it under the microscope for a couple of minutes, Doc Raeford said, “Morphology eighty percent, motility seventy percent.”Mike wrote the figures on the bull’s breeding soundness evaluation form. “He’s a keeper.”“Yep. Lots of swimmers.”“So, Doc, I’m getting out in three weeks. I’m going to miss working with you.”“I can speak with the parole board. They may argue for you to stay if I tell them what a big help you are.”“Oh, hell no. No, way.”“I’m messing with you, son.”Mike received the maximum sentence for being in possession of a smidge over two ounces of marijuana, likely because he’d refused to say who’d sold it to him. He smiled wistfully.Raeford palpated the bull’s scrotum and measured its circumference. He wrote the measurement down and gave a thumbs up to Mike, who pulled the lever releasing the head gate. The bull trotted out and was herded from the area by two trustees on horseback.The next bull had a higher body condition score but his sperm were sluggish, resulting in a motility score of only twenty percent. Despite being a handsome animal, he would not be kept for breeding. After the last of the bulls had been examined, Mike tidied the work area. He wiped off the electroejaculator and packed it, and the microscope, in their cases.Raeford sorted the evaluation forms by the bulls’ ear tag numbers. “That was a good day’s work. What do we have for next week?”“We’ll have several new litters of piglets needing iron shots, ear notching, and tail docking. And a batch of male piglets ready for castration.“The whole enchilada. That’ll keep us busy. Thanks for giving me a hand today.”“Yes, sir. Always happy to help.”

***

The following Wednesday, Mike had two tables set up in the farrowing barn, each with a large dog crate on top. One crate held a litter of piglets, the other was empty.Raeford pulled lidocaine, syringes, needles, a V-ear notcher, castration knife, brown glass bottles of iron dextran, and a jug of disinfectant from a black bag.Mike brought out the first piglet, cradling it gently in his calloused hands.“I’m back to square one with the search for an assistant.”Mike blinked and something fluttered in his stomach. “Why?”“The guy never showed up, and he’s not answering his phone. Maybe he got another job and isn’t courteous enough to tell me.” Mike stood mute as Raeford injected iron, punched divots out of the ear margins for identification, and nipped off the end of the piglet’s tail. He hugged the baby piglet to his chest and whispered in its ear before placing it into the empty crate. As he picked up another little one, his mind chewed over this new development. He took a deep breath and spoke fast, before he could change his mind. “Doc, would you consider letting me interview for the job?”Raeford frowned. “I thought you were going back to UPS?”“I’d rather work with animals.”“It probably doesn’t pay as much as UPS, but the job is yours if you want it.”It didn’t feel real. Mike didn’t want to ask but had to. “It’s not a problem, me being an ex-con?”Doc Raeford put down the tail nippers. “You’ve been my assistant for a year and you’re damn good at it. You treat the animals with compassion. I don’t give a good crap about anything else. You hear me?”“Yes, sir. Thank you.”“Now, let’s get going. It’s date night for me and the wife—she’s taking me to goat yoga.”

ADAM SOLDOFKSY RECOMMENDS: YEEHAW! Novella Round-up

July 23, 2025

The novella is famously “pocket-sized,” and marketed as such, in the relatively rare case when a publisher feels whimsical enough to produce one. Crassly, it is a work of fiction which achieves that mystical, begrudging minimum page length that warrants its nestling between front and back covers all on its own. And we as modern readers (forgive the assumption) respond to it as a physical object the way we respond to almost anything that is a smaller version of something else: with a kind of simple, unintimidated affection, the result of our own enlargement in its presence maybe, with anticipatory amusement, with the hope of fun—but no real expectation of “awe.”Being “fun-sized,” we want it when we want just a little something. Being “pocket-sized,” we keep it on us in case of boredom. It is dwarfed by the tomes on the nightstand. In fact, it has slipped between the mattress and bed frame and is lost—oh well. It does not concuss you when dropped on your head from a height. It is unsalable. It is ineligible for masterwork status.Formally, it is my favorite mode of fiction. And so I want to dispute that the diminutive “la” indicates a minor achievement. That the novella is not an immature form, or a form of modesty, or a running out of steam I hope can be generally accepted. But if not the simple failing to reach, either maturity or for loftier artistic goals, and undertaken with something specific in mind, to achieve something specifically—what then? What is it for?What makes the novella so wonderful, I think, is that it is a prolonged narrative—long enough to lose yourself in—that nonetheless you can read in its entirety, in a reasonable interval, with attention unbroken. You may enjoy it as a whole, and examine it immediately afterwards, with no slippage of memory. Because it remains intact. Because it is “human brain-sized.” It fits us, and on occasion, close to perfectly. To mix metaphors and organs: something smaller would leave you unsatisfied. A portion larger and you risk suffering from overindulgence. It feeds well your hungry eyes. It fills the mind-stomach pleasantly.Speaking of nourishment, that historically the novella has been a vehicle for moralizing is easy enough to understand. A reader can tolerate only so much didacticism (no more than 40 thousand words), after which the book is customarily thrown across the room. This is not the project of all novellas, of course. And modern readers, I imagine, are suspicious of such a project and disinclined to didactic literature announcing itself as such. But is this not a worthy project? Can such a work be a joy?Here are three books publishing this summer that engage with the aforementioned novella rubric, including its “moralizing” aspect (complementary), and which I recommend. That they play so freely in the same territory while maintaining total formal difference from one another also recommends them. They give a sense of the range of the novella form. They are exacting, ambitious, and instructive “smaller” works that mean to be what they are. Fresh, Green Life by Sebastian Castillo (Soft Skull, 2025)Fresh, Green Life is a novel 160 pages in length by Sebastian Castillo. Its time is spent half in examination of the narrator (Sebatián Castillo)’s idyllic, un-idyllic, misguided, haphazard, tender collegiate years as part of a small cohort of philosophy students in the tutelage of their disaffected, lazy, middling, lonely, unclean, full-of-shit, nonetheless better-versed and more advanced Professor, and half in anticipation of a New Year’s Eve reunion, years later, of all previously mentioned, but especially the once unavailable and now divorced Maria, at the aging Professor’s house in suburban Philadelphia. It is a tale told in the language of learning that suspects a gaping emptiness beneath all erudition. Its subject—as portrayed in the readings, musings, speeches, resolutions and vows of Sebatián—is the limits of Moral Philosophy with regards to the possibility of individual human betterment. Via Sebatián we are inclined to wonder: Does the life of contemplation not in-fact result in experience-naivety and lifeforce-crippling inaction? Isn’t there somewhere else a person should focus their efforts, somewhere out in the real world—the gym, for example? And who is all this improvement for anyway? Moral Philosophy may in fact be a trap, and yet Sebatián’s every trial must necessarily run the gauntlet of the philosophic tradition, must come into contact with all the great names, before it can be properly processed or at least buried away. And, uncomfortable or deeply uncomfortable, all improvement must be proved in the end, by presenting oneself before someone else who will form their own judgement, idealized or fucked as they themselves may be in one’s estimation. You will enjoy this novel(la) if you relish confronting delusions great and small, if you love philosophy, if you hate philosophy, if you revel in the language of erudition, if you suspect a gaping emptiness beneath all learning but hope very much to find something there. Patchwork by Tom Comitta (Coffee House Press 2025)The provocation of Patchwork, as with Comitta’s earlier The Nature Book, is supposed to be that it is not “authored” in the traditional sense, but stitched together from hundreds of texts, both obscure and well-known, spanning genres and historical epochs. But a book like this, in principle, shouldn’t trouble readers acquainted with other so-called “experimental” works deploying the technique of decoupage or assemblage. If there is any controversy with regard to The Nature Book, it should be surrounding the fact that it is a novel without any people in it— people being the novel’s primary reason to exist as an art form. As for Patchwork, it is a narrative fully populated with human beings, so many you are meant to lose track. Meet and enjoy them as they quickly vanish into the swirling background. There is a “plot,” and a fetish object to be gone in search of (a snuffbox), which lends itself to allegory if you badly want it to. There is the promise of love and adventure and misadventure, but these occur more as the conscious experience of the delirious effects of cacophonous language rather than via any character whose fictional status must be kept in denial. It is a didactic work insomuch as it hopes to reinforce a reverence for all manner of literary modes of language. Comitta senses that if the spell of their technique is to hold, and their moral be delivered, their book must not go on forever, though it could. Here the novella’s humanizing circumscription/compression dynamic comes to Comitta's aid. (Patchwork is published through Coffee House’s NVLA series). Now, if you are to grant the premise of the jacket copy—that this is a story stitched together “seamlessly”—here is where you will need to apply your goodwill and suspend disbelief. Your level of readerly enjoyment will have an inverse relationship to your level of tight-assed exertion in attempting to hold onto every thread. If you are an enthusiastic reader of John Ashbery—how his writing washes over you, leaving in its tide all manner of glittering linguistic debris—you will have a great time reading Patchwork. If you are one of the few who have read and enjoyed Ted Berrigan’s "western novel" Clear the Range, you will recognize this place and be quite happy here. Information Age by Cora Lewis (Joyland Editions, July 2025)“I work for the newswire, and I cover the economy, plus politics. I’m still getting the rhythm of it,” the narrator of Information Age informs the reader, and adjusting to this “newswire rhythm” is also the reader’s task. Lewis, a journalist when she is not writing fiction, tells her tale in staccato increments of images, dialogue, anecdote, and episode. Interpersonal and neutrally reported scenes, fragments that will amount to private epochs and world-historical events, are related interspersed, undifferentiated in tone or page time. The result is that familiar feeling of onslaught that we are accustomed to from scrolling timelines, but made pleasurable through Lewis’ skill, and because, though relentless and benumbing, we know a novella is taking shape. The narrator’s professional burden is to somehow make coherent news stories from an endless glut of amorphous material. The idea that there can exist a talent for this in certain individuals, “an ear,” begs the question of due vs undue responsibility with regards to those shaping reality for the rest of us. That the journalist might instead be a mere conduit, a mystical model of media, is also considered, if rather skeptically. But the true subject of the book, it seems to me, is the potential impossibility of forming a theory of individual rectitude in an apparently hostile era of technological acceleration, institutional decomposition and soon-expected environmental collapse. Too vast a problem to approach head on, it is wisely dramatized and brought down to scale through the narrator’s varied relationships, the people she knows and doesn’t, their respective predicaments, how they touch the narrator’s life and how they entangle. Add to this modern womanhood. Add the desire for children and their real possibility. Add personal ambition. Add the competing urges to lose and/or find oneself in someone else, in pleasure, to be still or travel, to leave things in the past or drag them with and subject them to imperfection, to act with the conception of a future in mind, to mourn in advance. What possibilities does language offer us? Are we, in so many ways, doomed (by our need for meaning-making)? Did I mention that the book is funny? Well it is at times, and melancholy. And its landscapes and people carefully rendered. You will enjoy this book if you have dissociated in the recent past, if time feels disjointed or has lately become a pleasant or unpleasant blur, if you think about sex, if “you’re experiencing a profound alienation from the production and dissemination of information” but you’re up for reading a novella.