Writing

Reviews

Featured
A Mass Politics of Beauty: On Hull-House’s “Radical Craft”
Jason de Stefano
A Mass Politics of Beauty: On Hull-House’s “Radical Craft”
Jason de Stefano

It is an anti-elitist, capaciously democratic argument against the disfiguring mystifications that turn labor into commodities and art into the purchase of a privileged few.

Jason de Stefano
Thinking like a Technocrat: On Brent Cebul and Lily Geismer’s “Mastery and Drift”
Henry Tonks
Thinking like a Technocrat: On Brent Cebul and Lily Geismer’s “Mastery and Drift”
Henry Tonks

The remaking of liberalism was both subtler and more profound than Clinton's slick campaign—soundtracked with Fleetwood Mac and enlivened by cynical displays of tough love—disclosed.

Henry Tonks
Form and Problem-Solving: On Mauro Javier Cárdenas’s “American Abductions”
Jack Rockwell
Form and Problem-Solving: On Mauro Javier Cárdenas’s “American Abductions”
Jack Rockwell

This regular interweaving of many voices is a potent gesture towards the multiplicity of our own interiors, the many voices we all bear within our heads.

Jack Rockwell
Impossible Familiar: On Julia Kornberg’s “Berlin Atomized”
Greta Rainbow
Impossible Familiar: On Julia Kornberg’s “Berlin Atomized”
Greta Rainbow

This head-spinning trajectory reflects a philosophy of translation where processes that appear deliberately non-linear and inefficient are a means to more beautiful ends.

Greta Rainbow
Irresistible Mirror: On Terry Allen and the Art of Biography
Harris Wheless
Irresistible Mirror: On Terry Allen and the Art of Biography
Harris Wheless

Now, at long last, we have an Allen biography. In Greaves, Allen has found the kind of friend, curator, and collaborator every great artist deserves.

Harris Wheless
The Held Tongue: On Hannah Bonner’s “Another Woman”
Kate Millar
The Held Tongue: On Hannah Bonner’s “Another Woman”
Kate Millar

In the quiet of the white space, the aesthetic of restraint creates a storehouse of energy brimming behind and between each uttered syllable.

Kate Millar
Truth-Telling: On Karen Lewis’s “I Didn’t Come Here to Lie: My Life and Education”
Tisya Mavuram
Truth-Telling: On Karen Lewis’s “I Didn’t Come Here to Lie: My Life and Education”
Tisya Mavuram

In her classroom, she would tell her students, “I’m not just going to teach you chemistry. I’m going to teach you life. Because you’re going to need that.”

Tisya Mavuram
It Is Easier To Imagine the End of Opera Than the End of Capitalism: On Yuval Sharon’s “A New Philosophy of Opera”
Thomas Hobhom and Nicholas Z. Liu
It Is Easier To Imagine the End of Opera Than the End of Capitalism: On Yuval Sharon’s “A New Philosophy of Opera”
Thomas Hobhom and Nicholas Z. Liu

For those of us who want the art of opera to persist materially—not just metaphysically—it is easier to imagine the end of opera, or art in general, than the end of capitalism.

Thomas Hobhom and Nicholas Z. Liu
Embodiment as Enigma: On Xi Xi’s “Mourning a Breast”
Mala Chatterjee
Embodiment as Enigma: On Xi Xi’s “Mourning a Breast”
Mala Chatterjee

What illness and pain cast into relief is that our minds will always be lost in translation—and will always remain in a liminal space—somewhere between our embodiment and the outer world.

Mala Chatterjee
Techno Worship: On Daisuke Shen’s “Vague Predictions and Prophecies”
Merilyn Chang
Techno Worship: On Daisuke Shen’s “Vague Predictions and Prophecies”
Merilyn Chang

It’s easy to imagine, though, that many of these stories exist in the same universe—dilapidated and hyper-developed, inhabited by emotionally fragile and lonely characters desperate for some type of human connection. Like many stories that are sci-fi by nature, it presents fictitious realities that are just believable enough to be scary.

Merilyn Chang

Essays

Featured
Appetite Studies: AI CAN NOT FEED US, IT DOESN’T KNOW WHAT INGREDIENTS ARE
Petra Wolf
Appetite Studies: AI CAN NOT FEED US, IT DOESN’T KNOW WHAT INGREDIENTS ARE
Petra Wolf

I asked CHATGPT about resources for an essay on Fredric Jameson, and multiple times it insisted I read The Cambridge Companion to Fredric Jameson. This book does not exist, and it isn’t linking me to The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism as each time I’ve tested it gives me a different author and publication year for this fake book.

Petra Wolf
Appetite Studies: Self-Devourer
Graham Maassen
Appetite Studies: Self-Devourer
Graham Maassen

Multiple day fasts with sunlight and black coffee, 60 hour work weeks, recreational substances, bootcamp workouts, breathwork classes, beach walks with family and dogs, etc. All became experiments to see if I could push the right buttons to become a well balanced individual. 

Graham Maassen
SELECTED APPETITES
Michael Credico
SELECTED APPETITES
Michael Credico

I consider losing my appetite to evidence positive moral and ethical standards.

Michael Credico
Appetite Studies: Food Science
Zach Savich
Appetite Studies: Food Science
Zach Savich

The genius would be like—do you know the two

ways to eat a beer glass? Like that was a situation

we were often in. He’d learned it from Jasper Gallon.

Zach Savich
Appetite Studies: Sam Rockwell in “The White Lotus” and The Futurity of Desire
Billy Lennon
Appetite Studies: Sam Rockwell in “The White Lotus” and The Futurity of Desire
Billy Lennon

Kojeve’s theory of desire, based on Hegel’s lord-bondsman dialectic and a huge influence on the thinking of one Jacques Lacan, was that desire isn’t simply about desiring an object, but rather about desiring to be desired, and desiring the object that desires you, in what could potentially become a house of mirrors of recognition and mis-recognition

Billy Lennon
Fear and Gloating at the New York Rodeo
Max Ornstein
Fear and Gloating at the New York Rodeo
Max Ornstein

“Bless us, o Lord,” went the reverential drawl, “and watch over our riders and our livestock. And Lord, protect the brave men and women serving in our armed forces and our first responders. And Lord, we pray that you will guide our elected officials as they seek to lead this country through difficult times.”

Max Ornstein
Winter In Review: Who Asked You, Anyway?
Cary Stough
Winter In Review: Who Asked You, Anyway?
Cary Stough

Maybe all I want from a movie—what any of us wants—is not only something to talk about, but something to talk to.

Cary Stough
The Night Side of Nature: On Robert Eggers’s “Nosferatu”
Brianna Di Monda
The Night Side of Nature: On Robert Eggers’s “Nosferatu”
Brianna Di Monda

Compared to Stoker’s belief in the positive influence of the Enlightenment and traditional Christian faith, Eggers’s narrative is a darker meditation on modernity’s spiritual blindness.

Brianna Di Monda
Fall in Review: A Lightness on the Edge of Town
Philip Harris
Fall in Review: A Lightness on the Edge of Town
Philip Harris

Without a premature claim to any kind of sagacity—that is, with all due humility, I begin to understand the epigraph to J. Salter’s final novel.

Philip Harris
This and Thats: Toward an Ethics of Digression
Lucy Schiller
This and Thats: Toward an Ethics of Digression
Lucy Schiller

As a reader, it’s flattering to be let in: to understand that the writer is playing with expectations, starving you a bit of plot, feeding you a ton of side dishes instead of a meat and potatoes dinner.

Lucy Schiller

Interviews

Featured
How Hope Outlasts Despair: An Interview with Yahia Lababidi
John Brantingham & Shaymaa Mahmoud
How Hope Outlasts Despair: An Interview with Yahia Lababidi
John Brantingham & Shaymaa Mahmoud

Lababidi’s Palestine Wail calls for the simplest, barest humanity, and it reminds us that loss of life, occupation, and genocide take an impossible toll on everyone.

John Brantingham & Shaymaa Mahmoud
Language as Rebellion: Yuri Herrera in Conversation with Daisuke Shen
Daisuke Shen
Language as Rebellion: Yuri Herrera in Conversation with Daisuke Shen
Daisuke Shen

Because even if you're speaking about ghosts, you're always speaking about yourself—about your neighbors and about your own history.

Daisuke Shen
The Secret City: Aaron Lange on the 1970s Cleveland Punk Scene
Andrew Worthington
The Secret City: Aaron Lange on the 1970s Cleveland Punk Scene
Andrew Worthington

Lange presents a beautiful and moving depiction of Laughner as a tragic poet amidst the end of the industrial empire of which Cleveland and Northeast Ohio were a microcosm.

Andrew Worthington
it’s of! it’s of! it’s of!: An Interview with Kai Ihns
Evan Williams
it’s of! it’s of! it’s of!: An Interview with Kai Ihns
Evan Williams

I think I'm really interested in things that iterate and shift depending on context, depending on vantage, depending on perspective, depending on relation. So maybe that's what some of that is.

Evan Williams
Here Comes the Champ: A Conversation with Nathan Dragon
Nik Slackman
Here Comes the Champ: A Conversation with Nathan Dragon
Nik Slackman

This never really happens, but I wanted it to be a book that anybody could read, more or less, because I got so many ideas for stories from people I worked with—when I worked on farms or in light construction, or growing up working at a pizza place. I always write and read in the morning, and when I worked on the farms or in construction, I would try to do a little bit before work since I knew the day was going to be tiring.

Nik Slackman
The Pulp Sublime: Interview with China Miéville on “The Book of Elsewhere”
Tim Thomas
The Pulp Sublime: Interview with China Miéville on “The Book of Elsewhere”
Tim Thomas

What had stirred Miéville’s return to fiction after more than a decade? What would this collaboration look like? Did this make Reeves a comrade? 

Tim Thomas
Coding the Dead: An Interview with Tamara Kneese
Jacob Bruggeman
Coding the Dead: An Interview with Tamara Kneese
Jacob Bruggeman

In Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond, technology scholar Tamara Kneese, director of Data & Society’s Algorithmic Impact Methods Lab and former green software researcher at Intel, explores the precarity of our data and digital selves.

Jacob Bruggeman
Love as Solicitude: On Geoffrey Mak’s “Mean Boys”
Sam Venis
Love as Solicitude: On Geoffrey Mak’s “Mean Boys”
Sam Venis

The voice sometimes shifts drastically between essays, which is an intentional choice—me playing around with this idea of “code-switching,” and also this postmodern aesthetic of schizophrenia, where I don’t just write from a singular voice, but multiple.

Sam Venis
Last Acts: An Interview
Jackson Frons
Last Acts: An Interview
Jackson Frons

I’m interested in men who are struggling to communicate what they feel because they have no language for how they feel.

Jackson Frons
The Body Is Not a Metaphor: An Interview with Emmeline Clein
Emma Glenn Baker
The Body Is Not a Metaphor: An Interview with Emmeline Clein
Emma Glenn Baker

Because this issue has been overlooked from a political and cultural and intellectual standpoint, partially because of its association with girls, I wanted to give it a really serious treatment.

Emma Glenn Baker

Excerpts

Featured
from “State Champ”
Hilary Plum
from “State Champ”
Hilary Plum

Don’t you get bored? they’d ask me about like the 5K, 10K, all the distance stuff, 25 laps around the track. I would be so bored. No. I don’t get bored, I was already bored. Pain distracts you from being bored and god do you need that.

Hilary Plum
from “A Seam of Electricity”
Ian U Lockaby
from “A Seam of Electricity”
Ian U Lockaby

I slept like a hot carbon barrier to the earth. In the dark, a further darkness: owl-hoots with my hands attached. I realized there was a kitten living in the corner, in the dream, it had birdhouses for sale.

Ian U Lockaby
from “The Book of Flowers”
Delilah McCrea
from “The Book of Flowers”
Delilah McCrea

Oh boy do I love explaining to the angry soccer mom that the Pikachu her daughter received is not, in fact, a boy’s toy and that we are only currently carrying Pokémon in all of our Happy Meals™.

Delilah McCrea
from “Fuel”
Rosie Stockton
from “Fuel”
Rosie Stockton

We could be many things – I could give it up, 
I could tell you exactly what to do.

Rosie Stockton
from “The Harmattan Winds”
Sylvain Trudel
from “The Harmattan Winds”
Sylvain Trudel

So the broccoli on my plate are elms, the mashed potatoes a castle, and the brown sauce is the moat’s muddy water. The sauce’s beans are crocodiles to scare off your enemies. In the castle there’s a radish that rules the kingdom, and a tower where a small marinated carrot I adore is being held captive.

Sylvain Trudel
from “Wrong Winds”
Ahmad Almallah
from “Wrong Winds”
Ahmad Almallah

Progress. It’s supposed to be good

for you, for you, and only you.

Ahmad Almallah
from “A Field of Telephones”
Zach Savich
from “A Field of Telephones”
Zach Savich

I liked the emergency room doctor who said, “This isn’t an emergency. You could’ve waited another hour.” Then stabbed a thing into my lung.

Zach Savich
from “See Friendship”
Jeremy Gordon
from “See Friendship”
Jeremy Gordon

The student loan bubble? Tensions with China? The hollowing of rural America? The collapse of the reasonable center? Medical debt, race relations? My God, the climate crisis, and on top of all that the looming threat of another four years, which, all liberal hysteria aside, our enemies in the Kremlin were probably planning right this moment? It added up, and it added up, and it added up until one actually could not believe how much it was adding up.

Jeremy Gordon
from “I want to start by saying”
Samuel Ace
from “I want to start by saying”
Samuel Ace

I want to start by saying that in the fifties and sixties Jews and Blacks moved into Shaker Heights.

I want to start by saying that the press said they were welcomed.

I want to start by saying they were not welcomed.

Samuel Ace
from “Gloom 11: Epilogue”
Jake Reber
from “Gloom 11: Epilogue”
Jake Reber

Smoke. Morphine induced reflective flashback. Restricted area. Observe > feel > transcribe > reflect > repeat. Hospital bed. Breaking news. Large blast. Conspiracies. Message boards. Static. Dread. Cybrids. Phantom limb.

Jake Reber