I think about you sometimes, though it’s been so long. That day on the lake in the little tin boat. We had fishing rods and books and the sun beat down on us. You wore that Indiana Jones hat, and I had a big floppy one. It was like we were a couple of movie stars. The summer just after my mother died. You stuck the wriggling worms on the sharp hook, and I lay back on a life jacket and read love poems to you.
Eli Ryder is a man as diverse as the fiction he loves. He is a professor, a father, and a writer. He goes from playing the guitar and singing around a campfire to filling you with horror when you read his prose. His story “A Quiet Street” was a Roswell Award honorable mention this year. Eli is one of the cofounders of the online literary magazine Automata, where he and his colleagues publish prose that pushes the boundaries of weird.
BY D.M. OlsenIt’s the opening night of Still Lives at the Roque Museum and it’s the buzz of the art scene in Los Angeles. It’s also the wildly anticipated return of Kim Lord, who has conjured up a twelve-piece exhibit portraying the murdered bodies of famous victims including Elizabeth Short, Gwen Araujo, Chandra Levy, and Nicole Brown Simpson. The only issue is, Kim Lord never shows up.
It’s hard to say that The Library by Stuart Kells is about a single library, or even the idea of a library as we have come to know it—a collection of books that the public can borrow. Stuart Kells’s library is both a historical compilation of well-researched facts that informs the public about the origins of our notion of the “library” and the examination of those assumptions.
Cast of Characters:
REMI #1, 22, male, an alcoholic writer. REMI #1 should not be wearing shoes.
REMI #2, 22, male, an alcoholic writer. REMI #2 should wear a ridiculously large black beret.
REMI #3, 22, male, an alcoholic writer. REMI #3 should carry an outrageously pretentious pipe and an enormous lighter.
REMI #4, 22, male, an alcoholic writer. REMI #4 should not exist.
All four characters should wear matching nametags without numbers throughout the play. All four characters should also be holding amber bottles.
Time and Place: Nowhere in no place. Never in the present.
As a big Fight Club fan, I came to this book with high hopes for the type of enthralling narrative interspersed with social satire—often bordering on the absurd—that Chuck Palahniuk is known for. Adjustment Day seeks to deliver the same impact—as Fight Club did in the 90s—in a sort of Version 2.0 escalation of the cult concept. Palahniuk uses the novel to introduce what the title suggests, an “Adjustment Day.” A day where a group of men, who have been reading a blue black book by Talbott Reynolds, gather to take down the men in power. They know who to target based on a secret list that has been circulating on the internet and gaining votes. The ear of a person on the list will garner the person who harvested it power in the new world order that is to form after Adjustment Day.
Annie rummaged in the black purse on her lap that she was relieved to recognize as her own and located a small lipstick mirror. She stared into it, moving it around the contours of her face, able to see only two rectangular inches at a time, but the pieces fit, yep, she was pretty sure that was her. She groaned. It took her a few minutes. Wish it wasn’t me. A black lump of self-hatred rose in her throat, bile.
BY: A.m. LarksIsolation and ostracization feature heavily in Susan Henderson’s latest novel, The Flicker of Old Dreams. The setting is Petroleum, Montana, population 182 and decreasing, “Those who’ve heard of Petroleum are often surprised it’s still here. The town is primarily known for what it no longer has: oil.” In a town this small, the people of Petroleum are required to be interdependent upon one another because the trains have stopped running, there is no cell service, and the winters are long and harsh.
REBECCA MAKKAI TALKS ABOUT THE RELEASE OF HER NEW NOVEL, THE GREAT BELIEVERS
A masterful story-teller, Rebecca Makkai blends tragedy and humor in her recently released book, The Great Believers, a novel that tells the very human story of Chicago’s gay community as it faces the emerging AIDS epidemic during the mid-1980s.
Leslie Jamison wasn’t a stereotypical drunk. She wasn’t a stereotypical student, either. Even at the peak of her alcoholism, Jamison held down a job, published a novel, and attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Yale, and Harvard without hitting a conventional bottom. If you read Jamison’s 2014 essay collection, The Empathy Exams, you know her unique voice, her elegant syntax, her capacity for listening to another’s pain and rendering it on the page as something unnervingly fresh. The Recovering is the story of Jamison’s journey to get sober, told through the filter of her research about the lives of other artists and writers.
Nathalie called me— called me!— to discuss her deathwatch project. She said the technology is there but the market for hardware is iffy at best, especially coming from a startup. She said there was no point launching from the inventor’s country of origin because socialists lack ambition. She said the inventor had only come to her because his full-time employer didn’t think the IP was aligned with its core values. The plan is to use a crowdfunding platform for market validation and to attract first-round investment. She said a courier would bring me a prototype so I could test it. Then she sighed. “Jay. Manufacturing will be like passing a stone.” That she called at all just goes to show how “compelling” she thinks this is for the American market. It was only the third or fourth time we’d actually spoken in the year I’d worked for her.
The rock where the scene takes place is before a backdrop of Biosphere II in Oracle, Arizona. Cactus and sage props give the illusion of a natural desert setting. Dawn is breaking. There is a light breeze. A large live lizard stands before the rock. The entire scene is addressed to the lizard with only short moments of reflection, or gestures toward The Dome. The speaker is a Yakima Elder, with a small flask, who decided to die instead of entering The Dome with his tribe.
I already know I won’t go in. I know I’ll die out here. Survival may be the greatest form of justice; and greed, the greatest evil. Right now, I’m fighting for the survival of my soul, gazing as deeply into the ancestral waters as I can. Honoring what’s there in my pinhole of light in the universe. It’s the best I can do.