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FAULKNER DIDN’T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT TEMPORAL INCONSISTENCIES, SO WHY SHOULD I?: AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN WADDY BULLION by Kirsti MacKenzie

November 21, 2025 · Interviews & Reviews

John Waddy Bullion is as versatile a writer as they come. His loosely-linked collection This World Will Never Run Out of Strangers follows coming-of-age tales of Midwestern sons and the fraught relationships they have with role models: fathers, grandfathers, uncles, peers, sports heroes. It’s also a showcase of Bullion at his best: forever balancing humor with pathos, mastering pop culture and sports references, commanding attention from first page to last. It’s a collection that’s quick to devour and demands re-reading; Cowboy Jamboree Press was smart to pick it up, and you can grab your copy here. Ahead of its November…

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THE ANSWER HAS TO BE YES: AN INTERVIEW WITH KIRSTI MACKENZIE by John Waddy Bullion

November 20, 2025 · Interviews & Reviews

Kirsti MacKenzie’s debut Better to Beg (Sweet Trash Press, 2025) is a rock ’n’ roll novel set against the backdrop (and at the tail end) of the Meet Me in the Bathroom-era New York indie boomlet, told in the vivid alternating voices of the Deserters—driven, determined Viv and drug-addled but transparently striving Hux—as they tumble across post-9/11 America’s cramped venues, wild house parties, and downtrodden motel rooms, forever arriving but never quite arriving. In MacKenzie’s deft hands, what emerges is not only a lean, mean, and surprisingly lyrical story of music and ambition, but also a sly exploration of the…

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YOU THANK THE MARQUIS DE SADE: AUDREY SZASZ’S ‘TELEPLASM’ by Jesse Hilson

November 13, 2025 · Fiction

My dictionary of British slang tells me that “Sloane” was the first name of an insufferable female archetype of the upper class in the 1980s. When I saw that the protagonist of Audrey Szasz’s novel Teleplasm (Amphetamine Sulphate, 2025) was named Sloane Epstein it suggested great wealth and privilege crossed with echoes of the human trafficking, pedophilia, and white collar underworld of Jeffrey Epstein. Indeed, the novel exists in a narrative Petri dish of high-class travel, Internet media celebrity, psychological deterioration and pervasive sexual violence. Sloan Epstein is a young woman attached to a roving paranormal researcher Dr. Novák, her…

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AGES by Sarah Chin

November 12, 2025 · Micros

Thirteen was the year I discovered spite. Fourteen, eyeliner. Fifteen, seduction in a slow blink. At sixteen, I mailed seventeen birthday cards to myself, all unsigned. My mother asked who loved me that much. I said: someone who knows the value of quantity over quality. She looked proud, as if I’d finally become a woman. I looked away, counting the candles, calculating how many more years until I could vanish without anyone noticing.

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MAKING CONNECTIONS AND DRAWING LINES: AN INTERVIEW WITH EMMALEA RUSSO by Rebecca Gransden

November 11, 2025 · Fiction

Since its release in fall 2024 Emmalea Russo’s Vivienne (Arcade Publishing) has had time to percolate with the culture it so sharply interrogates. A slanted satire, the book poetically autopsies online mores and offers a giddy sojourn to the realm of the artist, both the world they invent for themselves, and that imposed from outside. Three generations of a family are positioned as focus for the novel, and Russo bestows this trio with an enchanted ordinariness. What constitutes a violent act? By the end, flesh and blood puts words to shame. I spoke to Emmalea about the book. Rebecca…

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BECKETTIAN by Shane Kowalski

November 10, 2025 · Fiction

Murphy was visiting Malone. It had been a while since they had seen each other. Murphy being busy in the city, while Malone had lingered in the countryside. Murphy remembered those dark country roads, whizzing down them in the nights as a youth. No noise. But at the same time, all the noise in the world. The humming shadows. Malone was always the type to leave enough room between himself and other people. Murphy, on the other hand, had become a successful C-AWP II, a thing he so frequently had to explain to new acquaintances that it had lost all…

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THE BROKEN TOWER by Kaden Griggs

November 5, 2025 · Fiction

The hulk of the Orizaba lulled hugely in the calm spring water as if the waves were tongues tasting the air in broad gulps like old hounds lapping water from ground puddles. Not much moved. The poet was drinking and avoiding his beloved. His father had died and he was very sad tonight. He had never felt emptier within. Lust enters when the hollowness leaves nothing else behind. He makes the mistake of believing again that the drinking will bury the lust and set things aright but it only invigorates the lust. Lust for all things. Lust for the remembrance…

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WORD HORNY: JACK SKELLEY RECOMMENDS

November 4, 2025 · Interviews & Reviews

writer Nastya Valentine with books reviewed by Jack Skelley Nastya Valentine – Cyberhorny: Navigating a Sexual Dystopia, and The Cyberhorny Dream Diaries: In Defense of e-Subjectivity (cyber-horny.com) Earlier this year, a writer friend said to me, “You and Nastya should talk. Her new book is kind-of Myth Lab-adjacent.” This was in reference to my novel (subtitled Theories of Plastic Love, Far West press). Sure enough, both Cyberhorny and its Jungian appendix The Cyberhorny Dream Diaries orbit with my art obsessions in “the clitoverse” – the eroto-celestial plane where forces of pleasure defeat the denial of desire and warping of…

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HI by Erin Kelly Smith

November 3, 2025 · Fiction

She filled out her first dating profile in a frenzied whirl, half-drunk on the yet-undigested news that her ex had brought someone with him to Thanksgiving that year. For a photo, she uploaded the professional headshot that was on the “Meet Our Team!” page of her work’s website, then quickly removed it, fearing these unknown, savage internet men could reverse-image search their way to learning every private facet of her life. She snapped a brand-new—and thus unsearchable—photo of herself standing and staring into her hallway mirror. She intended a smile, but only captured once its bloom had faded, her expression…

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NIGHTMARES COME AT NIGHT: ELEVEN BOOKS FOR HALLOWEEN by Matthew Kinlin

October 31, 2025 · Fiction

Nightmares come at night. The poster for Halloween III: Season of the Witch shows the silhouettes of three children walking in Halloween costumes against a red night. A ghoulish apparition evaporates above them into electric blue. The tagline at the bottom of the poster reads: “The night no one comes home.” Here are some recommended books that approach horror and other areas of eeriness in new and unexpected ways. Eleven lost souls drifting into darkness. The night goes on forever. Kier-La Janisse, House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (Fab Press,…

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