MY IDEA OF SELF IS SELF-INFLICTION: Jared Daniel Fagen in conversation with Vi Khi Nao
I don’t feel free, Vi. Never have. I know you don’t either. I don’t know anyone who does, or has. Maybe nothing is, nor should it be.
CALVIN WESTRA’S “DONALD GOINES” REVIEWED by Conor Hultman
What Westra does is this brilliant magic trick: he takes these simple sentences, with their insouciant humor, and stacks them like bricks.
CENTOVIEW WITH DAVID WOJCIECHOWSKI by Evan Williams
I thought the world would understand. But no.
WRITING BY EAR: Dashiel Carrera interviewed by Kira K. Homsher
Transfixed by the odd turns and cadence of its speech, each day I set a timer and kept writing until the alarm went off. This approach no doubt held its roots in my background recording music: I thought of these writing sessions like performances, called “takes.”
THE WORSER PERSON IN THE WORLD: STEPHANIE LACAVA’S I FEAR MY PAIN INTERESTS YOU by JC Holburn
LaCava’s story straddles a tenuous faith that through constant debasement and submission a breakthrough can occur, undergirded by a mind/body conundrum: if the pain isn’t felt, is an uninvited infliction technically still misconduct? Answer: yes, yes it is.
RAVI MANGLA on film with Rebecca Gransden
Video, broadly speaking, is the medium people interact with most on a daily basis, so I think contemporary fiction has some obligation to engage with it (if aiming to render the world as it exists).
LAUGHING PRUDISHLY; A REVIEW OF MARSTON HEFNER’S “HIGH SCHOOL ROMANCE” by Evan Williams
For Hefner, the awkwardness is the point, and he wields its power well.
J DAVID OSBORNE on film with Rebecca Gransden
I’ve always been confused about books that attempt to tell a straightforward, filmic plot through the written word. Isn’t that just a less-good version of a medium that already exists? Instead, why not adopt film’s self-confidence?
MYSTERY AWAITS: A REVIEW OF CRAIG RODGERS’ “FRANCIS TOP’S GRAND DESIGN” by Kristin Cleaveland
There is an otherworldly quality to many of these tales, a blurring of edges that gives the impression that the stories’ events take place somewhere between waking and sleeping.
MONROE LAWRENCE IN CONVERSATION WITH VI KHI NAO
VI KHI NAO: Almond was mentioned quite a few times on page four of About to Be Young. Can you tell me about your relationship with this edible oval nutty thing? When I was in Spain, eating pistachio ice cream for lunch, dinner, and breakfast, the ice cream maker kept repeating “almond,” and “almond” over and over to imply the almond tree growing in the winter months a few hours from Granada. It reminded me of your poem that begins with “Oh God” and ends “crying almond, almond, almond into the night.” Will the poets in my…