COAGULOID by Hank O’Neill

It tastes so god I can’t hav another bite I say — and the hole of evrybody jus shuts up like oh is she about to stop? Loud one second and then gasping like is this reel? I hear somone literallay go holy fuk is that the end of Mis Plasteek? They’re holding out ther phone recording as they say, Guys I can’t beleev I’m catching this on video, plees like and subscribe. Meenwile I see the Produser behind the curtain mouthing to me: okay nice, now milk it.  Which is jus wat we rehursed.  The guy with the phone…

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DAVE FITZGERALD RECOMMENDS: Brandi Homan’s ‘Burn Fortune’, Kristin Garth’s ‘Daddy’, and Danielle Chelosky’s ‘Pregaming Grief’

Paint Your Wagon, the 1969 Western musical starring Jean Seberg, Clint Eastwood, and Lee Marvin, was a historic commercial flop, by turns both mindbogglingly strange, and mind-numbingly dull in its depiction of an anonymous, gold rush era mining camp cycling through the increasingly corruptive stages of insular capitalism. While its atonally sing-songy, borderline nihilistic theme reprises (many, many times over, burrowing into your brain and simply refusing to resolve), we watch as some 400 men invest their lucky-struck earnings into six agreeably trafficked women until their No Name tent City grows into a hedonist boomtown—a collection of 20-some-odd saloons that…

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YOU TEACH ME HOW TO BE by Emma Burger

You’re all so thin and beautiful. I only wanted to be like you. To want for nothing. To live in a gorgeous Tribeca loft. To wear Brunello Cucinelli and Loro Piana like it was nothing. To show up to morning drop-off at P.S. 234 with an expensive blowout and a full Alo set, en route to pilates. You lived the life I thought I deserved.  One day. For now, I was supposed to be your yoga teacher. Your guide. I wanted my body to look like all of yours, but I was the reason yours looked the way they did….

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TWO DAYS AFTER THEIR MOTHER DIES by Kim Magowan

Josie uses her key to let herself and her sister Amy into Cora’s apartment. She walks in first, then turns to see Amy standing in the doorway, hand braced against the doorframe. Josie says, impatiently, “Come on.”  Finally, Amy enters this apartment their mother lived in for three years, moving here after she injured her knee and at last accepted that it made no sense for an older woman to be living in a house with two sets of stairs. But Amy has never seen it, because she’s so stubborn and unforgiving.  Watching her older sister walk slowly into the…

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AVALON by Saoirse Bertram

On the Fourth of July the grandmother took Vase to the top of the warehouse where a rickety carriage of iron stairs led to the roof. The sky was as orange as a snake’s belly and smelled of powder and dust and oil. They sat without speaking watching the brilliant detonations which Vase had never seen before just as she had never seen the full horizon of sky over Los Angeles and when the grandmother felt tired Vase was sorry to have to leave the sight so soon.  Vase had only been with the grandmother for a couple months at…

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NEAR-MISS IN A STRANGE LAND: A CONVERSATION WITH SIENNA LIU by Rebecca Gransden

Sienna Liu’s Specimen (Split/Lip Press, 2025) seeks to articulate the ineffable facets of desire. A fragmentary and lyrical hindsight finds lovers in an entanglement as fragile as it is seemingly unwise. Not only an interrogation of memoir, of the compulsion to write other people onto the page, but a probing commentary on the price and rewards of setting out on such a task. When we look back, what do we ask of those who reach out in memory? I spoke to the author about this plaintive and dissecting book.   Rebecca Gransden: When did you set out upon writing Specimen? What…

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BABY PHONES by Elena Zhang

The babies are all born with phones in their hands. It hadn’t always been this way, but the babies needed a way to call poison control at their own leisure. At night, we hear the babies babble into their phones as we weep into our empty hands, while the soothing tones of the poison control operator tell them how to save themselves.

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COME AND SEE THE VIOLENCE INHERENT IN THE SYSTEM by Saul Lemerond

It’s another hot day, and the tide is rising. The son shoulders his father’s rifle and walks back toward the beach house thinking the reason he’s shot the hole in the tank is because his dad refused to buy him a half million follows. “Please like, comment, and subscribe.” He says, holding his phone at eye level and trying to steady his hand because he is still shaking with generational anger he will probably never understand.  Water spills out onto the ground as the cat patiently watches the flapjack octopus scurry to the opposite side of its tank. Time is…

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SWALLOW by Hannah Grieco

The pharmacist has to get the key, which is missing for the moment. The tech apologizes. It was hanging by the fridge in the back, just yesterday. He’s not sure where it went, but the pharmacist will find it as soon she finishes filling the Lithium prescription. “Just the 300 mg, right? You guys are pausing the 150s?” Yes, 300 mgs. Once in the morning and twice at night. We’re moving down from the larger dose, but if I say, “Yes, we’re going down in the dose permanently, I hope,” if I say, “So far we’re doing pretty well,” if…

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LATE TO WORK by Benjamin Drevlow

This morning I’m hauling ass across the intersection across from the Krispy Kreme opposite the Kum & Go so I don’t get steamrolled by one of the yokels in their jacked-up pickups when some old lady in a jacked-up pickup swerves across oncoming traffic, throws open her passenger door, calls me honey and hollers for me to get in. I’m thinking she’s about to say she’s from the FBI and somebody has a hit out on me. But then she just says, You late to work, honey? I’m jogging in sweatpants, a sweatshirt, and winter hat. I tell her no…

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