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This collaboration with Theo Ellsworth is unique. Ellsworth’s style is reminiscent of R. Crumb, the underground comics pioneer whose iconic black-and-white cross-hatching and the exaggerated features of his character are instantly recognizable. Combined with Dara Horn’s erudition, the comic book style makes the ancient story seem somehow more relevant and more subversive.
The author of Bastardland talks about his latest book, his writing habits, the satisfaction of writing, social media, on unsettling a reader, the joys of publication, and more.
The streets, bridges, buildings, and cafés “where Prague lives” provide a wealth of stimuli to which Nezval responds with a catalogue of memories. His Prague is like the site of an archaeological dig whose layers expose various periods of personal history. It also is the site of shops whose windows display goods that take on hallucinatory appearances, and the setting for chance meetings with strange characters and events that touch on the uncanny.
The poems are raw and pull the curtains back to reveal intimate family dynamics and heartbreak. Death was real and claimed a young neighbor and she wonders about an afterlife and “starved myself to safety, transcendence”. With no real example of how to live, she had to “transcend”, “starve”, develop an eating disorder as a way to survive the death and destruction around her that was felt and yet hidden, unspoken, unacknowledged: “under tablecloths,/the makeup”, stashed in the “trunk of a new car”.
Hemant has a groom’s procession, arriving on a horse; and, of course, the bride is beautiful. It rains, torrential rain (the monsoon that follows summer)—and a long-awaited young man arrives, Umang (Jas Arora), and exchanges glances with Ria. The rain further washes away formality and pretense. Everybody dances.
The Ballad of Falling Rock is a stunning book that follows at least four generations of a family in the Appalachian region near Virginia and in tiny towns and forests. If you are a Hemingway fan, this one’s not for you. Or, if you are a Hemingway fan but maintain an open mind, you can read it and set yourself on a path thick with adjectives.
James Sale is not using “lazy rhyme;” he is deliberately, carefully stretching the boundaries of what is acceptable rhyming convention in English formal poetry. He uses his slant rhymes, half rhymes, near rhymes, assonant rhymes, consonant rhymes, light rhymes, and syllabic rhymes with abandon. With joy. With freedom. Lavishly. He is demonstrating that our language is a language that by default doesn’t always perfectly rhyme— but when you get close, it can be as beautiful, and powerful, and in many instances, more effective than a perfect rhyme can ever be.
In this tongue-in-cheek interview, the author of Life Engineering and The Truth About the Moon and the Stars talks about his writing process, what he exclusively listens to, why he writes fiction, his ideal readers, what he does for fun, and more.
Diane Wald crafts a richly atmospheric and emotionally layered narrative, exploring themes of identity, guilt, and redemption through Violet’s journey of painful self-discovery. Vividly capturing both the familial eccentricities of an artistic community and the complexities of human relationships, this tender, unflinching story follows Violet’s struggle for self-forgiveness, becoming a moving testament to the resilience of the human spirit.
In the flash fiction of Dan Flore the conflict could go either way, and often, to his readers’ benefit, it does. Everything Must Go does indeed entertains, and often his protagonist’s pain is his reader’s pleasure. The poet and memoirist John Yamrus’s introduction gives readers a good perspective on Flore’s work.