Celebrities often take an omnipotent position in modern society, acting as paragons, villains, and jesters of our time. Their opinions are met with adoration or disdain, satire, and protest. They influence style, commerce, and politics, and we, the readers, guide their rises and their falls. They walk the fine lines of artists, athletes, influencers, and journalists who must balance both…
By Nicholas Belardes In Tyrell Johnson’s second novel, The Lost Kings, Jeanie King has to stitch together a violent, uncertain past in order to understand the mysterious disappearance of her brother and father. We’re right there with her, tight amid all her reliability and unreliability as a narrator. At times, her traumatic story reads like a case study of the…
by Melinda Gordon Blum The memoir Nein, Nein, Nein! has us at its subtitle. The “one man” is none other than Jerry Stahl, whose acerbic humor and kinetic prose transported his book Permanent Midnight into a fever dream classic, a standout in the crowded “junkie memoir” genre. Who better to pen a modern-day reckoning with the legacy of the Holocaust…
by Allison Scagliotti I remember when Tower Records shuttered for good. Gen Xers wept openly, bemoaning the death of their community locus. Too young to have integrated into a scene of my own, I wondered what my version of this loss might be one day. My view from the minivan passenger seat was as much about deciphering the L.A. in…
White Space Tell me about these white spaces you write y o u r s e l f i n t o. They look so clean on the page. Does it feel free? Giving words bounteous space around …
by Trey Burnette Making mortgage payments, paying off credit card and student loan debt, and season tickets to the opera are excellent reasons for becoming an accomplice to your revolting non-boyfriend/boyfriend’s murders. At least they are for Charlie from Leitchfield. And even though his sort of love interest, Jignesh, is “a pompous sea monster from the depths of the Indian…
Girding Up The coat still fit. The arms, the chest, all of it in brown corduroy. And his wool stocking hat. Also out of vogue, that he’d thought he lost, he now pulls over his ears.…
All men will resemble one another in the way they use their feet. But no one can tell what any given man will do with his hands. . . . The hand is the direct connect with man’s soul. . . . When a free spirit exists, it aches to materialize in some form of work, and for this, the…
Thin, light-etched yellowish-orange lines where her eyelids met. Red Rothko squares stamped her eyelids. Bright white light framed Chuck’s goggled face the moment before Jen opened her eyes. She breathed in smoke, ash, particles, and dirt. It hurts to breathe: searing pain. It was May 25, the start of a new year. The blanket wrapped around her quickly became too…
The rain has come to ionize the alien frontier, calling out storms over a smeared earth. We sit in varying stages of anesthesia staring at the long sky, the secondhand measured in lives. We disciple new religions with the sun and the moon. We abandon them as they dismay. We survey the rim of heaven with our elastic eyes. Rivers…