CONTROL AND THE FUCKTOPUS: A CONVERSATION WITH CHRIS KELSO ABOUT ŻUŁAWSKI’S ‘POSSESSION’ by Alice

Chris Kelso is a Scottish writer of dark, weird fiction. I came to his work through Voidheads (Schism), and he’s since published Metampsychosis with Feral Dove, and most recently, a monograph on the film Possession with PS Publishing’s Midnight Movie Monographs. Possession, as it happens, is a long-time mutual obsession of ours, so when I freaked out in Chris’ Instagram comments about this monograph he very kindly sent me a copy. So I decided to interview him about it. He’s a great sport. Didn’t even get annoyed at my stupidly long ‘questions’, which are at times more monologuing than questions,…

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‘DOOM IS THE HOUSE WITHOUT A DOOR’ BY LOGAN BERRY: AN INTRODUCTION by Kathleen Rooney

Introduction for Logan for his Reading from ‘Doom Is the House Without a Door’ at Comfort Station on Saturday, August 16, 2025 –Kathleen Rooney Book launch playlist: DOOM UNLEASHED   Logan Berry’s latest book gets its title from the Emily Dickinson poem “Doom is the House without the Door—” whose first stanza says:  Doom is the House without the Door— ‘Tis entered from the Sun— And then the Ladder’s thrown away, Because Escape—is done— Logan Berry’s literary house also has no door, but not in the sense that one is trapped inside by walls lacking egress. Rather, nothing blocks this…

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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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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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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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NOAH KUMIN INTERVIEWED by Matthew Binder

In 2023, I published a novel called Pure Cosmos Club. For reasons still unclear to me, it was embraced by the downtown New York literary scene loosely known as “Dimes Square.” Despite the association, I never made real inroads—not because of the rumors (funded by Peter Thiel? Christian reactionaries?) but simply because I was too shy. One of the scene’s more prominent figures is Noah Kumin, founder of The Mars Review of Books. From afar, I watched his profile rise through various ventures: the magazine, a popular podcast, and a reputation for hosting raucous literary parties. When I saw on…

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CHRISTOPHER ZEISCHEGG’S ‘THE MAGICIAN’ reviewed by Chloe Pingeon

There is a nightmarish quality to Christopher Zeischegg’s The Magician. I read the book twice, the first time through the haze of an all nighter—sleep deprivation and sleep paralysis hastening my descent into the blur of self destruction and bodily decay that the narrative presents. “Just a thing inside your body that won’t listen to your head,” a malignant acquaintance tells the narrator early in the novel, as a prescription of sorts for the root of all his problems. At dawn, this rings true. This distance between body and self, judgment and subconscious, good and evil, is perhaps the root…

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ADAM SOLDOFKSY RECOMMENDS: YEEHAW! Novella Round-up

The novella is famously “pocket-sized,” and marketed as such, in the relatively rare case when a publisher feels whimsical enough to produce one. Crassly, it is a work of fiction which achieves that mystical, begrudging minimum page length that warrants its nestling between front and back covers all on its own. And we as modern readers (forgive the assumption) respond to it as a physical object the way we respond to almost anything that is a smaller version of something else: with a kind of simple, unintimidated affection, the result of our own enlargement in its presence maybe, with anticipatory…

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BURIED PATHOLOGIES AND THE ULTIMATE ‘NO PLACE’: An Anti-Interview with Oli Johns by Ryan Raymond Buell

How many people will read this interview? Will anyone read it? Will exactly three people read it—the writer interviewed, the editor interviewing, the publisher publishing … before a handful of thumbs sends it scrolling offscreen in their search for more content?—so much to read and digest, to form a perspective on … I can’t. I don’t have time. Just swipe to the bottom and see if it leaves a mark. It’s hard to know if I watched this or imagined it, but there is probably a cyberpunk anime where someone plugs a metal cord into their brainstem, and the data…

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BOOKS THAT NEEDED TO BE SAID: I CAN’T STOP THINKING ABOUT. Recommends by Shane Jesse Christmass

Why did I choose these books? Perhaps because, to me, they represent literature that stands apart from the hegemonic literary marketplace … operating outside the structures of commercial garbage publishing, which prioritises market-driven narratives and commodifiable claptrap stories. They resist assimilation into the literary industrial complex, which often seeks to sanitise or manipulate raw human experience for consumption. Instead, these texts engage in an unapologetic exploration of obsession, identity, and the dissonance between desire and self-destruction.  These writers embrace a nonconformist aesthetic, their works subvert the conventional expectations of plot resolution and character redemption. The protagonists are not mere vehicles…

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