INTERVIEWS & REVIEWS Archives

IT DOESN’T END WHEN YOU CLOSE THE BOOK: AN INTERVIEW WITH KEVIN M. KEARNEY by Leo Vartorella

June 24, 2025 · Interviews & Reviews

Kevin M. Kearney’s latest novel FREELANCE (Rejection Letters, 2025) is a dystopian thriller. It is a psychological profile of loneliness in the age of OnlyFans. It is a condemnation of AI and the gig economy. It is the story of a young man’s search for purpose, part character study and part surreal, page-turning romp. Above all, it is a lot of fun. The novel follows Simon, a driftless 19-year-old driver for the rideshare app HYPR, whose world is upended when the app offers him a seemingly life-changing opportunity. This combination of breadth, emotional acuity and fast-moving plot is nothing new…

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NEW WAVES AND NOWHERE ROADS: AN INTERVIEW WITH BRANDON TEIGLAND by Rebecca Gransden

June 20, 2025 · Fiction

With the short fiction collection My Child is a Stranger (AOS, 2025) Brandon Teigland offers a close reading of possible futures. Teigland’s exploratory voracity lays the groundwork for an examination of impulse, whether towards the limits of art or the human. The realm of theory has to live in our very real, fleshy heads, at least for now, but what happens when assumptions break down? I spoke to Brandon about this questing and interrogative collection. Rebecca Gransden: How long has the compilation of My Child is a Stranger taken you? What was the process of choosing the stories for…

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ALL OUR TOMORROWS: AN INTERVIEW WITH AMY DEBELLIS by Chris Dankland

June 17, 2025 · Interviews & Reviews

Over the last year or so, Amy DeBellis has been one of my favorite newer short story writers. Now she has a new novel, ‘All Our Tomorrows,’ published by CLASH Books, which is one of my favorite books of the year. Her writing is so skillful: the language, the plots, the pacing, the characters. But I also love her writing because I find many of her stories to be dark and bleak. To me, her stories feel steeped in depression, menace, and a kind of claustrophobic doom. I want to present the reader some examples of stories we’ve published by…

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WHISPERING GALLERY: AN INTERVIEW WITH WILL CORDEIRO by Rebecca Gransden

May 28, 2025 · Interviews & Reviews

Will Cordeiro’s fiction unfurls a kindly finger and beckons you to follow an uncommon path. As you tramp along seldom visited trails, your mind wanders as much as your feet. You arrive at the peculiar, the disquieting and the mysterious, without a clue how you got there or even if you want to leave. With Whispering Gallery (DUMBO Press, 2024), Cordeiro invites entry to an off-kilter world, where those who disappear into the mist entrust their steps to the uncertain ground beneath them. I spoke to the author about this curious collection. Rebecca Gransden: Some people claim that time isn’t…

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SEASON OF THE RAT: AN INTERVIEW WITH ELIZABETH HALL by Aiden Brown

May 19, 2025 · Fiction

Against the verdant landscape of boarded-up gay bars, bluffs that swell over cresting waves, and hot sand between toes, a haunting, frenetic, and razor-sharp narrative scurries to life in Season of The Rat (Cash 4 Gold Books, 2025). Like the rat, author Elizabeth Hall invites her readers to “taste it all- flowers and cigarettes.” The result is a work which resists definition—part novella, part confession, part dissertation, and part infestation. The reader plays the simultaneous role of voyeur and confidant, observer and observed, the rat in the ceiling and the girl who listens to its scurrying steps below. Season of…

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SIGNAL ISSUES AND FUZZY SNIPPETS: AN INTERVIEW WITH CHASE GRIFFIN by Rebecca Gransden

May 13, 2025 · Interviews & Reviews

Chase Griffin’s alchemical style continues with Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace (Corona/Samizdat, 2026). At once a fanciful record of an unfathomable mind and experiment in merriment, the book is unabashed with its lingual adventurousness. When life gives you strange frequencies it’s time to whistle your own tune. Griffin is a psychedelic jester, and, as is common to that type, also the smartest guy in the room. I spoke to him about the book. Rebecca Gransden: Where there are gaps in this text, there are gaps in my life. I was only able to write this introductory material after an…

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DREAMS OF EXURBIA: AN INTERVIEW WITH DONOVAN REYES by Rebecca Gransden

May 6, 2025 · Interviews & Reviews

Donovan Reyes’s domain is that of the illuminated store, the lonely places on the outskirts of town, the back rooms of an America in thrall to the failure of its own myth. With denouement (Anxiety Press, 2025) Reyes envisions a peripatetic slumberland, surroundings subject to abstruse moods. Nowhere addicts succumb to an anaesthetised pulse, ensnared by the numb rhythms of a society gone ill on its symptoms. I spoke to Donovan about the book. Rebecca Gransden: Simple place to start, where did denouement begin? It strikes me as a piece that has a lifetime’s worth of backstory and experience…

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KYLE SEIBEL’S ‘HEY, YOU ASSHOLES’ IS NOT NEAT, BUT IT’S PERFECT: A CONVERSATION by Naya Clark

March 26, 2025 · Interviews & Reviews

Kyle Seibel is not a veteran writer or a magical realism writer, but he is a veteran and his writing has magical and realistic attributes. He is still breaking into the literary world even though he seems to have a hang of it. He’s witty on a website we used to call Twitter, and can write a hell of a short story. Rarely does he add quotes when his characters are speaking and he doesn’t capitalize his story titles. Seibel is based in Santa Monica and lives with his wife and dog named Snacks—who also has an established internet presence…

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ROSE BOOKS READER VOL 1: GROUP INTERVIEW

March 19, 2025 · Fiction

The Rose Books Reader Vol 1, “Primal Scream,” publishes March 20th, full of “prose that explores characters or narrators somehow on the edge or on the brink, in chrysalis or transition, in various states of emergency or desire, struggling to cope with the realities of our contemporary world in real or surreal ways, with some success or no success at all…” that is “an engagement with emotional extremes or environmental collapse or feelings of bodily entrapment…that is desperate, unhinged, hallucinatory, hormonal. In keeping with Rose Books’ mission—“we believe in taking risks for the sake of beauty[.]’” I asked the contributors…

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STUFF YOUR FACE WITH SCOTT LAUDATI by Scott Laudati

March 11, 2025 · Interviews & Reviews

A special offshoot of our Recommends series, where Scott Laudati enjoys the planet’s best foodstuffs and eateries. New York City, 2010. It’s a 24-hour city. Budweisers are $3. We complain about the rent but a one bedroom is $950. Something big is happening every night in Brooklyn. The So So Glos are playing in a loft and our friend Dasha knows the door code. The garment building hasn’t been annexed by Netflix yet, its basement is rented by an old Marxist who calls it “The CCCP Gallery” and Drew is having his art show there tomorrow. And most importantly, pizza,…

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