TWO SHORT PIECES by Ellie Powell

In which Kazuo Ishiguro runs a dating hotline on the radio like in Sleepless in Seattle   ME Hello?   KAZUO ISHIGURO Hello, you’ve reached the Kazuo Ishiguro Dating Hotline. My name is Kazuo Ishiguro. How can I help you tonight?   ME Oh, wow. I didn’t think you’d actually pick up. I’m Ellie. I loved The Buried Giant.   KAZUO ISHIGURO Everyone loves The Buried Giant. We’ll see what Guillermo does with it. Are you dating, Ellie?    ME No, but it’s all a bit more complicated than that, don’t you think?   KAZUO ISHIGURO No, not really.  …

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THE SURRENDER OF MAN: A CONVERSATION WITH NAOMI FALK by Rebecca Gransden

With The Surrender of Man (Inside the Castle, 2025), Naomi Falk examines twenty works of art, using each as both touchstone and springboard for scrutiny of modernity. An exhibition of the psychic space inhabited by the intersection of time, memory and art itself, the book unravels as a stream of commingling impulses. Falk’s often febrile interrogations display a hunger to get to grips with the interior world as it probes contemporary existence. At times raw, inspirited, raging, and contemplative, the volume acts as a catalyst for the author’s questioning nature, and stridently asks what the hell is art for anyway?…

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HEIR APPARENT by Jack Lennon

1 Your wife was overjoyed when your uncle drowned in three inches of water at the bottom of a cave. It meant your family would inherit his house. Although you both wished it wasn’t in such tragic circumstances. That’s what you kept saying to people. Not that you had any strong feelings about him or his death. You barely knew him. Was spelunking in Chile a normal pastime of his? Nobody knew him well enough to tell you. Not at the funeral, not during the will reading, nor when you took his place in his very respectable neighbourhood. They would…

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PORTRAIT OF YOU IN FIVE PSYCHICS by Kirsti MacKenzie

First guy says: you’re gonna see a UFO. Like, BOOM. He lays this on me. Right now you’re probably thinking well, if that doesn’t torpedo the whole thing for you. But it didn’t. Okay? It didn’t. I sat there and let him tell me I was gonna see a UFO because sometimes you’re in the middle of a divorce and sometimes staring down the barrel of your life and sometimes you’d pay someone, anyone, to tell you that you’re not completely fucked.  “Where do I go with this,” he says. “Do you believe?” “In UFOs?” I ask. “Sure, what the…

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PILE DRIVE ME INTO THE EARTH by Thora Dahlke

Althea Downs spends all summer break in her bedroom. Through the pivot roof window, the sun deep fries her no matter where she sits. She drinks berry-kale smoothies and listens to macabre podcasts that give her strange dreams about swimming pools full of blood. She showers at midnight and sweats through the entire night, wakes up cocooned in sheets so soaked you’d think the scale would finally plunge below 100. It does not. She thinks about killing herself, but only casually. This is her tenderest hobby, lazy and indulgent, she spoils it like a rescue. It’s not really death she…

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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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