admin7EyZHDb8HNC8btr3, Author at X-R-A-Y

Adolescent Nesting Disorder by David Scott Hay

May 20, 2026 · Fiction

Mandy screams her son’s name as pine needles crunch underfoot. Missing for thirty-six hours, the Park Service worries. You can go days without water, she remembers, more without food. Her son is lean, but resourceful. So many mornings he’s helped his younger brother get ready for school. Still, she takes an ogre’s swig from her flask and screams into the forest and listens for a response, a rebuttal, an echo. Anything. Nothing. A pine cone lands at her feet, and then a stick. Her heart now the thrum of a hummingbird. She cranes her neck and sees a large shadow….

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Brendan Gillen Recommends: Songs for the In-Between

May 19, 2026 · Interviews & Reviews

I can’t listen to music while I write. Even as I sit here writing about the music that either inspired, or is directly referenced in the stories that make up Hang Time, my new collection out now via .406 Press, the only sounds I hear are the gurgle of my own stomach, the scratch of pencil on paper, and the hurl and rush of afternoon traffic on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway outside my window. I’ve DJ’d and collected records for over twenty-five years. I still read Pitchfork every morning, for better or worse. I’m always on the hunt for sounds—new,…

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Narcotics Anonymous by Jennifer Ostopovich

May 18, 2026 · Fiction

I’m not quite old enough to stay home by myself while my mom works, so I tag along to my dad’s NA meeting with him. I snag a ball from a large plastic bin on wheels and bounce it off the wall in the opposite corner of the school gymnasium where the meeting is held. No one seems to mind. The men are focused on their meeting and barely acknowledge I’m there. I pretend not to listen while each one details his struggles with addiction. Darren “No-Nose” Gibson is the first to speak. He rubs at the bridge of his…

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Slug Life by Matthew Dexter

May 14, 2026 · Fiction

I blow blunt smoke of Unicorn Poop in the shape of brontosauruses through my tracheotomy hole. My son Connor is a gangsta rapper. Connor rocks relentlessly on our rickety porch swing, guzzling cans of Coors Light, spitting rhymes to the beat of the squeaky double-loop chain. His Mormon friends listen intently, bopping their skulls with the wizardry of worldly tweakers. Connor can catch a sunburn from the refrigerator lightbulb. His flow is smoother than a baby-oiled boob and colder than a clew of earthworms. Connor’s rap name is Cocaine Cul-De-$ac. His YouTube channel bankrolls cases of Coors Light, gaudy gold…

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A Day In the Life by Kaylee Howard

May 13, 2026 · Fiction

I am watching men kill pedophiles in Walmart online while my mother cooks dinner. I guess they don’t kill them directly — a self-inflicted shotgun spray to the skull will do them in after two thousand comments about his texts with minors and allegedly small penis appear in the comments. It doesn’t make the local news because they aren’t allowed to put suicides on the news. My mom got the recipe for the pasta she is making from a blog that insisted on inserting ten paragraphs of the creator’s life story before mentioning a single ingredient. I’m not sure if…

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Chatting with the Meat Puppeteer: Ben Gross interviews Hannah Smart

May 12, 2026 · Interviews & Reviews

Hannah Smart’s debut novel Meat Puppets (Apocalypse Confidential, 2026) is a metafictional romp through the lives of people who know they want more without being entirely sure of what they want more of. Weaving her way through drug-use, acting seminars, and a celebrity-based stock exchange where people can put up real money in the hopes of cashing in on the soon-to-be-famous (or-not), Smart crafts characters whose lack of self-transparency makes them as relatable as they are complicated, as charming as they are repulsive, and as touching as they are fantastic—then she puts them through the wringer. Like all great works of experimental fiction, Meat Puppets’ formal fireworks…

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Miracle on Route 45 by Owen Harrington

May 11, 2026 · Fiction

There was only one way things could end. I was trying to find something else to think about and he emerged, covered in red clay mud like the first or last man, right onto state route 45. The ride back to State College was just long enough to fixate on something, but not long enough to work up the nerve to turn around. It strung together Mifflinburg, Harleton, and Milheim like the dim lights of a dying civilization in the heart of darkest Amish country, and had few features to catch the wandering eye. But just past Mifflinburg, a man…

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Author on Author: Cairo Smith and David Polonoff – Part Two

May 6, 2026 · Interviews & Reviews

Part Two: Cairo’s Questions to David about Wannabeat (Trouser Press Books, 2024). Click here for Part One. The Novel Within the Novel Cairo Smith: Your hero, Philip, spends much of WannaBeat working on (or avoiding working on) his book, which seems like a deliberate parallel to your own project. It features thinly veiled versions of the people around him (Sally Sassafras for Wendy, Heine for himself), an elaborate Gold Rush allegory, and eventually the arrival of El Nihilismo to destroy everything he’s built. Is the novel-within-the-novel a parody of WannaBeat itself, or a record of an earlier failed attempt,…

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Author on Author: Cairo Smith and David Polonoff – Part One

May 5, 2026 · Interviews & Reviews

Part One – David’s Questions to Cairo about Scenebux (New Ritual Press, 2025). Part Two will publish tomorrow. Is Scenebux a Kind of IRL Cyberpunk? David Polonoff: Many of your readers (myself included) have noted the parallels between Scenebux and the work of William Gibson in its fluid mixture of hard-boiled detective/thriller narrative and post-human technology. You’ve quoted ARX-Han on the difficulty of “writing cyberpunk now, because real-life just is cyberpunk.” To what degree is that true? Is it like reading Jules Verne in the 20th century and marveling at the inventions and gadgets he foresaw or more that the cyborgian…

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Art, Oxy, & L.A.: An Interview With Luke Goebel By Kevin Maloney

April 23, 2026 · Interviews & Reviews

Luke Goebel is a unicorn in the literary world: an outlaw writer with an underground classic in the indie lit community (Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours, 2014) who has also collaborated on screenplays for two major Hollywood films, Causeway and Eileen, cowritten with Ottessa Moshfegh (the two married in 2018). His new novel, Kill Dick, seeks to bridge these worlds, bringing all of the fire, guts, and intelligence of an experimental indie to a page-turning sunshine noir thriller that feels ready for the big screen (and is in the works). The result is an imminently readable crime novel…

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