by Harris Lahti
I laugh too hard, for too long. Maybe owing to the fumes. Or perhaps owing to what my lawyer said. That this lawsuit could go for up to a year. Or longer even.
My cell phone rings, and I pick up: Hello, Mickey Mouse.
FICTION | NONFICTION | POETRY |
TRANSLATION
SUBMIT STORE DONATE OPPORTUNITIES INTERVIEWS WRITERS WE PUBLISH
by Harris Lahti
I laugh too hard, for too long. Maybe owing to the fumes. Or perhaps owing to what my lawyer said. That this lawsuit could go for up to a year. Or longer even.
My cell phone rings, and I pick up: Hello, Mickey Mouse.
by Lynne Steger Strong
Too many stories teach us, my friend said to me the other day as we walked aimlessly around the city, that we’re all supposed to be heroes of our lives. He blamed capitalism. Perhaps too easy a foil in 2019. But all the systems that we build are implicated in and bolstered by the other systems under which we function. We can’t tell any stories in the western world not informed in some way by capitalism, by all the specific and myopic (see also: mostly white male) stories that we’ve been told before. We can’t tell stories that look like those stories without amplifying or reaffirming aspects of these systems in and under which we’re all functioning.
by Siena Oristaglio
As the only mammals that can fly, they are often
imagined as something not-quite-mammal,
a species dancing in the liminal space
between bird and rodent.
by Sean Gill
The cover of Martin Amis’ Invasion of the Space Invaders: An Addict’s Guide to Battle Tactics, Big Scores, and the Best Machines really sets a tone.
by Tess Crain
Spanning 1929 to 1936, Walter Benjamin’s The Storyteller Essays, out this year from NYRB Classics, circles the question: Why is the art of storytelling dying out? The collection comprises thirteen pieces of diverse form and audience that nonetheless share a thematic lineage. Just as the salient features of grandparents (a curved nose, full lips) may suddenly manifest in the faces of a younger generation, here, concepts and even whole passages from an earlier meditation will resurface, slightly altered or not at all, a few essays later. At the end of the book, short writings by contemporaries (Bloch, Lukács) and inspirations (the playful Hebel, Herodotus) are appended. From an ardent cross-pollination of ideas, traits of these authors, too, crop up in Benjamin’s work.
Sophia Shalmiyev writes, “Jeannie Vanasco’s second book, Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl, has a narrative structure and aim that is completely new, charged, activated. The book will leave people stunned. Jeannie Vanasco performs a lot of labor in this book to examine the male side of sexual assault, which usually escapes our purview and any responsibility, even if a man is arrested for assault. Arrests or convictions happen so rarely, it is staged as a crisis to be examined through the lens of justice, through a scarcity of justice model, but we still do not get the story, we do not get the understanding the victims and survivors need. The shape of violence lives invisibly inside of a woman. Now, the narrator is sharing a sliver of that burden with the perpetrator, and they are both wearing it, or are about to, publicly: she as the author; he, as a man with a pseudonym who has willingly submitted to being interviewed by the woman he wronged when she was a girl.”
by Rachel Lyon
by Robb Todd
Please take a moment to consider and appreciate how the Department of Motor Vehicles has influenced contemporary poetry.
by Zack Graham
You don’t read Ben Lerner’s writing. You read Ben Lerner’s mind. His immense, contorted, self-effacing, hilarious intellect propels his narratives. Sure, his novels have characters, plots, themes. But those elements aren’t why Lerner is one of America’s best young fiction writers. Lerner is brilliant, and his novels resemble doctored and polished transcripts of his mind’s inner workings.
by Siena Oristalgio
As I watched small flitting creatures
appear again and again in the poems,
I was struck with a sudden desire to witness
some such small creatures in person.
by Tess Crain
Certain writers assault you with their intelligence, not as, or only as, a performance, but rather out of necessity: they simply cannot stop thinking. Humor has long been the balm of metacognition, laughter a scaffolding over the abyss.
by Robb Todd
Flash fiction is not fiction as a white horse is not a horse.
Fiction, the god of the outermost circle, is so powerful that those who strictly write facts are defined in opposition to it: nonfiction.
Categorization is tyranny, even if it is useful to customers who might care to know what they are buying without having to think too much about it.
An original poem by Tom Paine.
by Zack Graham
Rivka Galchen has never published the same kind of book.
Dorothy Spears (illustration by Kendra Allenby)
by Tess Crain
What is the meaning of an imaginary friend? Appearing mainly to children but at times lasting into adulthood, invented companions can signal madness, creativity, both, or neither. Sometimes, they simply serve as company. A writer I know used to have an unreal pal named Zee—“he had a kind of sarcastic jauntiness”—who resembled a wisp of smoke and wore a monocle, like an ephemeral Mr. Peanut: “he was my only real friend for a while.” My roommate had a tiny, bald, blue man who sat on her shoulder and scouted for danger. A college friend once had multiple miniature dragons. In most cases, these familiars erupt from the collision between psyche and environment: reading a fantasy series, watching performance art, loneliness.
by Robb Todd
Black Light is a rare book. Kimberly King Parsons has delivered a work of truth and beauty that will transcend generations. If that sounds too effusive, it is not. This is also the rare book that bears promotional blurbs indistinguishable from critical reviews…
