INTERVIEWS & REVIEWS Archives

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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YIELDING AS GLASS YIELDS TO FIRE: AN INTERVIEW WITH MANDIRA PATTNAIK by Rebecca Gransden

February 4, 2025 · Fiction

Shifting states. The novel-in-flash Glass/Fire (Querencia Press, 2024) exhibits the unfolding travails of girlhood, a reality adorned in rich contradiction and symbolism. Mandira Pattnaik’s sumptuous language carries forth a deep and sensuous meditation on life’s volatility. The wildness of nature’s forces at their most capricious lend an elemental intensity to fate. A dynamic and revealing exploration of growth, I talked to the author about the book. Rebecca Gransden: In the mood we were in, fire could be liquid, could be sand, or molten like lava, or flames, licking the last of us. You open the book with the above line….

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An Interview with Jeffery Renard Allen by Kenny Meyer

January 23, 2025 · Interviews & Reviews

I was introduced to Jeffery Renard Allen’s brilliant short story collection, Fat Time (Greywolf Press, 2023), by Chaya Bhuvaneswar (prize winning author of Dancing Elephants). At the time I was a participant in her short story class. She made a habit of urging me to get out of my reading rut and explore the work of writers from divergent cultural backgrounds. Chaya had plenty of good things to say about Allen’s Fat Time, so I bought a copy. I should explain that I come from the opposite end of the cultural universe from Mr. Allen and the characters he portrays….

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CHARLENE ELSBY RECOMMENDS: Books from the Void

January 21, 2025 · Interviews & Reviews

Since I went to VoidCon 2023, I’ve pretty much been catching up on the books I acquired there. And the problem only got worse after VoidCon 2024. Organized by Evan Dean Shelton and Edwin Callihan, VoidCon is a curated convention for weird fiction and weird horror, including literature, art and music. Art’s that, like, “wouldn’t it be nice if it found commercial success” but nobody’s expecting it to. The void aesthetic is irreverent and fun while dark and existentially horrid, and militantly encourages the participation of diverse voices on their own terms. So as an artificial way of imposing order…

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