September 23, 2014 | Interview
Realism Seems So Much Harder: A Conversation with James Sutter
Matthew Simmons (@matthewjsimmons)
A few months back, I got the opportunity to (once again) indulge the teenage role-playing geek inside me when I got a short-term contract job editing game materials for Paizo, the company
Hypothetical Empathy Online and the Five Tenants of Rejection
Sean Kilpatrick
When you love someone who won’t love you back, that is your full time job.
A Gaze You Could Meet: My Struggle with My Struggle, Book 2
Andrew Bomback
David Shields: Every artistic movement from the beginning of time is an attempt to figure out a way to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the work of art.
In the summer of
Garnish and All
Sara Gelston
Liking the world is not easy, though sometimes it is / a large wave that carries you.
Ruth vs. the Klingon
John Haggerty
Gene is fluent in Klingon, comfortable even with the tricky irregular conjugations of the stative verbs
Sin City: A Dame to Kill For
Sean Kilpatrick
Please go read the reviews for this movie on The Onion, the pissant caboodle that now passes for Roger Ebert.com, and Ain’t It Cool News, yeah, them too, for some reason.
The Fisherman
Hunter Sharpless
At first sight the line, nearly invisible but sometimes catching a ray of sun through the clinging water droplets, ran parallel to the brown water’s surface, from the tip of the pole held by the fisherman standing in the shallows out to unknown depths.
Self Interview with a Hideous Man
Trevor Dodge
But you know, all of us prose writers in the United States have to deal with the shadow he casts and the work he left behind.
To Speak of the Woe that is in Marriage by Robert Lowell
Suzanne Scanlon
Roxana and Robert are in therapy because they argue: about the baby, about the laundry, about therapy, and about therapy, too.
True Life: I Married Scott McClanahan
Juliet Escoria
One morning I wake up and there are over thirty new texts on my phone, all from him. While I was sleeping, we got into an argument, made up, and then started fighting again, all without my knowledge or participation. Right now he is breaking up with me.
elizabeth ellen calls aaron burch on all his shit
Elizabeth Ellen
let’s start with my most pressing question, one you haven’t answered IRL: WHY DID YOU TURN DOWN BRAD LISTI?
GREAT MOMENTS IN CINEMATIC DRINKING: The World’s End
Matt Sailor
Simon Pegg would kill for a beer. Will. Has. Is. Over and over again. An hour into The World's End, halfway through a pub crawl he's been waiting twenty years to finish, he engages in a beautifully
Five Animal Poems
Cassandra de Alba
Before, the possums’ noise had been an angry hissing, but now their voices were becoming sweet, even musical, the world of them trilling and humming into their endless, private night.
Your Call is Important to Us: Ballad of a Telemarketer
Shannon McLeod
“My son was murdered last year. His bride murdered him.”
3 Lazy Wolf Comics
Alex Jiang
Hmmm... When Butcher Bear was murdered, he was probably cutting meat.
Pap Smear for Beerfest
Sean Kilpatrick
You can’t ban my books for saying this shit because no one bought them anyway. Some guys have all the luck.
Cold in July / The Rover
Sean Kilpatrick
How they say something doesn’t wink at an audience, this caws its eyelids off. What we got? Mad Men? True Detective? Those shows are about acting. (Sometimes about writing in service of plot. Oh, True Detective, almost, so close until the final explanation cribs us all.)
Ron Allen’s Entertainer Zero Machine at Hasting’s Ballroom, Detroit, 2004
Sean Kilpatrick
Where the fuck are the collected plays of Ron Allen? The police have won, that’s where.
REFLECTING ON MY FIRST YEAR OF SOBRIETY
Jordan Castro
I had my bags packed and was getting ready to leave with two insane-seeming girls who offered me sex in exchange for a ride to Cleveland when a few patients stopped me and essentially pushed me into the lecture hall. I don't know why I didn't put up more of a fight -
Safe Tangents: My Struggle with My Struggle, Book 1
Andrew Bomback
I googled “Karl Ove Knausgaard AND Nicholson Baker” and didn’t find much. A review of My Struggle from The Monthly, an Australian magazine, compared some of Knaugaard’s reflections to “Seinfeld’s