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In a stunning bit of reportage at Guernica, Lacy M. Johnson looks at the costs of laying nuclear waste to rest, and at the impact doing so has had on one particular St. Louis suburb. For Nowhere, Hillary Kaylor finds there’s little she can do to help the kids who spend their days scavenging a dump in Cambodia.
...moreAt Electric Literature, Joshua Lockwood interviews PANK‘s founding editor M. Bartley Seigel about the origins of PANK, which was sold in November and will be under new management by the end of the year. In addition, Seigel discusses what his experience as an editor taught him about American literature: American literature is robust, vibrant, and very much kicking and screaming. Reading and […]
...moreIf you’re looking for something to read over the Fourth of July weekend, you’re in luck. This week gave us brand-new issues of Virginia Quarterly Review and PANK to peruse in the beer-buzzed downtime between barbecues and fireworks. VQR’s summer issue is all about California, “as an idea and a place,” as the Editor’s Note says. […]
...moreOn Tuesday, Aqueous Books released From Here, Jen Michalski’s second short story collection and fourth book. The founding editor of the literary quarterly jmww and a long-time Baltimore resident, Michalski’s fiction has found homes in more than 80 publications. Looking at the early reviews and the stories from the new collection that have appeared online, […]
...moreIf you live in the Bay Area, you owe it to yourself to make it out to this release party for Ashley Farmer’s book Beside Myself, out from our essays editor Roxane Gay‘s own Tiny Hardcore Press. THP—and its associated litmag, PANK—are celebrating the new title at the Make-Out Room in San Francisco, where they’ll be joined […]
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M. Bartley Seigel has a presence that fills a room. It is no surprise, then, that the prose poems in his debut collection, This Is What They Say, fill the page with a raw sense of place and longing, an undercurrent of anger and adulation
...moreIt’s been awhile since I’ve been a-Rumpusing, but I got this email from the talented Ashley Bethard thanking me for including her in an old Here Are Some Stories I Like link list, and I got to thinking about how much I loved doing those, so I asked Isaac if I could do them again, […]
...morePANK reviews Rumpus contributor Joseph Michael Owens’ Shenanigans! “Whether centering on a nunchaku-wielding neighbor, the mistrust between man and his best friend over nail-clipping, or a wedding proposal that leads into buying more than a landlord-approved number of dogs that leads into a parental heart attack that into a personal unknown health threat, these stories […]
...more“How to write sci-fi erotica: Imagine what Mary Shelley would write after fucking Pris from Blade Runner.” At PANK, Kirsty Logan wants to tell you how to write genre. What are the scariest books you know of? “One hit literary wonders” (via) Why writers have to be careful when they talk. (via) Do you write or […]
...moreI get bored easily, so rather than the political links I usually run on Sundays, I’m gonna switch it up. Instead, here’s a list of five awesome and fun and weird and very short stories that I happened to come across while reading through some independent online lit mags, complete with a great sentence from […]
...more“I feel that for writers, an obsession with what is elegant or what is a cliché or not a cliché can become very inhibiting.” Booker Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro stands up for cliches. (via Bookninja) “Laughs were out, torture porn was in.” Colin Bateman wonders what happened to humor in crime fiction. GIANT wants to […]
...more“When a writer tells me they give up, or when they fatalistically declare they will never be published, I begin to understand how little people know about how publishing often works. One of the reasons I started the Q & A feature was to pull back that editorial curtain. The weird mystery within which the publication […]
...moreMy relationship with the book blogs has hit a snag. Today, we got in a throw-down fight, and I came pretty close to breaking some china. It’s just that the blogs whine and worry and complain a lot, and they always seem to want to cheat on me with famous writers, like Martin Amis or […]
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