X-R-A-Y SPECS: BLOODY NOSE, EMPTY POCKETS
Like Terminators or cockroaches, dive bars will always rise again. They’re one of the last bastions of organic and spontaneous social connection.
THE WORLD IS AN UNCOMFORTABLE PLACE: An Interview with Tara Campbell
I just kept doing it until I had over three dozen paradoxes saved on my computer. Some of them allowed themselves to be shaped into publishable stories.
FOOTNOTES THE READER CAN’T SKIP: An Interview with Brett Biebel
What’s the relationship between reality/life/history and stories? When do stories productively enrich our lives, and when do they overtake them to a troubling degree?
A DANCEABLE ROCK NUMBER ABOUT DEATH: An Interview with O.F. Cieri
I enjoy the wish fulfillment of making up a controlling, overbearing asshole and then torturing him by making everything go wrong no matter what he does.
AN INTERNATIONAL NETWORK OF SHITHEADS: An Interview with Kyle Seibel
Kyle experimented with ChatGPT once: “What are twenty-five short story ideas?” The answers it puked out were uniformly terrible, except for one.
X-R-A-Y SPECS: ZARDOZ (1974)
I knew I was going to love it when the head started to vomit guns. The tone felt like a Monty Python film. Is that a common comparison?
OUR MONSTROUSNESS AS A TEMPLATE: An Interview with B.R. Yeager
At my most pessimistic I’ve worried that this collection is akin to charging people to watch me at the gym; when I’m more optimistic, it feels like I’m just flexing in different genres.
I’M JUST LIKE EVERY INSECURE WRITER: An Interview with Drew Buxton
There was this thing near San Antonio when I was in high school called the Elmendorf Beast that killed livestock. It turned out it was just a coyote with mange.
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.