admin7EyZHDb8HNC8btr3, Author at X-R-A-Y

HITTING THE BOARDWALK AND THE BEAT: AN INTERVIEW WITH JESSAMYN VIOLET by Rebecca Gransden

June 27, 2025 · Fiction

These actors are cracked. Out from under techno-creep overseers rise the rejects, the dropouts, and the freaks. A counterculture funhouse, home to strung out hedonists, underground musicians, magic practitioners, and those just looking for the next party. With Venice Peach (Maudlin House, 2025), Jessamyn Violet creates an alternate reality that seems too wild a proposition and yet right around an interdimensional corner. Politics and show business intermingle in new and strange ways, as LA’s free spirits are put to the test. I spoke to Jessamyn about this unruly book. Rebecca Gransden: Step right up here, Pop Stars and Punkers……

admin7EyZHDb8HNC8btr3

WE FOUND AN ENORMOUS HOLE by Quinn Adikes

June 26, 2025 · Fiction

We happened upon the enormous hole by chance. It was a tremendous hole. The largest I have ever found. Perhaps twenty feet in diameter and located in some woods along the Southern State Parkway. The walls of the hole were perfectly flat and thus of unnatural design, although I cannot say who would have dug such a thing. I could not see to the bottom. I threw a rock in and listened to it bounce against the walls, and listened to the sound grow fainter and fainter and eventually vanish altogether. Of course I urinated in the hole. My need…

admin7EyZHDb8HNC8btr3

ORCAS, or LIFE & ART & MAGIC & BEAUTY by Aaron Burch

June 25, 2025 · Fiction

My buddy Pilot comes to visit. Says it’ll do him good to get out of town for a couple days—new scenery, change of pace, leave the normal life problems and complications and stresses behind. But also we’ve been wanting and meaning to hang out for a while. The new scenery and change of pace and leaving behind of life’s problems and complications and stresses are all bonus. Icing on the cake, cherry on top. All that. It’s sunny out, blue skies, warm. It is beautiful, in that way that can feel unique and special to the Pacific Northwest. We make…

admin7EyZHDb8HNC8btr3

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

June 24, 2025 · Interviews & Reviews

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…

admin7EyZHDb8HNC8btr3

THE VIEW FROM BETHLEHEM by Robbie Maakestad

June 23, 2025 · Creative Nonfiction

Israel Defense Force (IDF) Soldier: “What the fuck are you doing?” Banksy: “You’ll have to wait until it’s finished.” IDF Soldier (to subordinates): “Safeties off!” —Banksy’s account of painting the West Bank wall, 2005 Blue and white guard rails shepherded us from a bus stop toward the low, sprawling Checkpoint 300 gate complex outside of Bethlehem where my friend and I planned to cross from Israel on foot into the West Bank. The imposing concrete West Bank wall stretched endlessly in both directions, reminding me of photos I’d seen of the Berlin Wall, although at 26 feet high, this…

admin7EyZHDb8HNC8btr3

NEW WAVES AND NOWHERE ROADS: AN INTERVIEW WITH BRANDON TEIGLAND by Rebecca Gransden

June 20, 2025 · Fiction

With the short fiction collection My Child is a Stranger (AOS, 2025) Brandon Teigland offers a close reading of possible futures. Teigland’s exploratory voracity lays the groundwork for an examination of impulse, whether towards the limits of art or the human. The realm of theory has to live in our very real, fleshy heads, at least for now, but what happens when assumptions break down? I spoke to Brandon about this questing and interrogative collection. Rebecca Gransden: How long has the compilation of My Child is a Stranger taken you? What was the process of choosing the stories for…

admin7EyZHDb8HNC8btr3

SORDID LITTLE WORLD by Gerri Brightwell

June 19, 2025 · Micros

You reach your forties and your life’s nothing but bus rides to work, and long hours in the lab, and a sandwich for lunch because with a mortgage and a spouse and two nearly-grown sons your pay doesn’t go far, and every day it’s rinse-and-repeat, your life fading away in this windowless room with its unsparing fluorescent lights, its stink of solvents and reagents, and then one day you mix compound A with solution B and what you’ve made is a substance so viscous and black you can scarcely believe it, you tip it out and it’s like you’ve poured…

admin7EyZHDb8HNC8btr3

CASSIE by Matthew Feasley

June 18, 2025 · Fiction

Everyone was lined up to watch. We’d waited months. Cassie sat beside me on the curb as her dad revved the engine of his bike. Ready. All eight cars from the night’s derby were bumper-to-tail in front of him like a canyon. He had cleared seven in Wichita once, but never eight. Cassie’s step-mother Luann had refused to show. Cassie and I both wore shirts with a graphic of him soaring through the air. He signed them earlier that day, laughed and apologized that he was out of the smaller sizes. “Christ sake, those look like dresses on you two…”…

admin7EyZHDb8HNC8btr3

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

June 17, 2025 · Interviews & Reviews

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…

admin7EyZHDb8HNC8btr3

HIS BODY by Amy DeBellis

June 16, 2025 · Fiction

We’re brushing our teeth side by side at the sink, like we do every night, when I see it. A spot of bright red on my husband’s face, peeking through the bangs that have been out of fashion for years, but which he refuses to grow out because I adore them. It’s no bigger than the tip of my pinky. But it’s definitely not a pimple. It’s flat and even and there are ripples in the skin around it, like the imprint left by a tiny elephant’s foot. I get less than a second’s glimpse before my husband bends over…

admin7EyZHDb8HNC8btr3

« Previous 1…9 101112 13…37 Next »