Latest Features
The Slippermen
1. Habitat
You reside in the top story of an abandoned building in a unit known as a symmetrical skybox. It features floor-to-ceiling glass walls on opposite sides of the building for observing the external world.
To the west exists an animal sanctuary with artificial constructs known as trees. The sanctuary houses howler monkeys, black and gray, small and ropy. In the center is a retention pond in which the monkeys play and frolic or drown each other.
To the east lies the super ocean, pewter like the sky, roiling with dead sea life and toxic blooms. Almost hourly, the ocean births hurricanes, magnetic storms, and poisonous gases.
A short story by Patrick Pujolas.
Hexagrams of the Heavens: Hejira at 50
The song, full of light and air, may well be the most purely beautiful on the album, with Victor Feldman’s soulful vibes and Larry Carlton’s pointillist guitar harmonics as fine as the vapour trails at those icy altitudes: ‘It was the hexagram of the heavens / It was the strings of my guitar’. The lyrics are exquisite. Each verse presents a conundrum from which there is no escape. The strings of her guitars might well be the bars of a prison; ‘life becomes a travelogue’ with no exit; paradise is false; the roads are ‘cursed and charmed’; Icarus flies too high and plunges to his death; and, finally, she crashes into someone’s arms.
By Richard Skinner.
Agnostic
Convergent evolution is a phenomenon by which two similar-looking species come into existence via completely different strands of evolution. For example: slugs. There are a lot of them, all over the place, all over the ground, crawling and slithering and writhing in various states of amorphousness. They all derive originally from one mollusk which had upon its back a shell and begat all the rest. Time passed. Descendants went in different directions and grew other stuff, like horns, and became different colors, like yellow, and decided to get rid of the shell without telling the others. But then many of the others just so happened to have the same idea, separately, because maybe the shell was heavy. And that’s what me and this one friend I have are like. And I know I’m taking liberties, because I’ve never been in the tiny beansprout mind of a slug before, but my friend understands how evolution works, I don’t have to explain it to her and I never would because that’d be condescending, and yet she doesn’t actually believe it’s real.
A short story by Meghan Proulx.
One Good Look Is What You’re Worth
If someone asks you—like say the USPS guy passes by you where you’re tossed belly sunward on the lawn and on his way to the mail slot asks you—hey there kid what’s new, you say nothing much, except lately what you’ve been up to is you got the hang of holding your breath real nice & long, a good three minutes plus some change, is why you’re lying on the lawn like starfished with a belt three notches tight around your chest so you don’t cheat, until your eyes go flat & milky and your mom yells thru the kitchen window at you quit messing around and get your ass up off the grass and stop embarrassing the mailman.
A short story by Max Steiner.
By its Bad Side
From the perspective of the present we would call any such indictment — if indeed one can be detected — weak. But we would thereby miss the crucial point that, for a long time, it wasn’t really possible to condemn one’s own people for committing atrocities unto another people. There wasn’t an accepted language for it, other than the discursive mode of mere description. This, anyway, is what Robbins argues in his latest book. It is the long, fraught emergence of precisely this concept — the capacity to name, recognize, and narrate mass violence against noncombatants not as misfortune or necessity but as a distinct moral and political scandal — that Bruce Robbins charts in Atrocity: A Literary History.
Benjamin Libman reviews Atrocity: A Literary History by Bruce Robbins.
Transubstantiation of the Soul: An Interview with Sue Fox
I want to find keys into my being and know how it works. Just as there are the 12 stages of the decomposition of the body, there are also the 12 stages of orgasm. I am like my own doctor always working out what is going on and reacting accordingly and aesthetically. We can be the masters of our own bodies, recording all the information and gaining insight and understanding its intelligence. I could feel my cunt talking to me on every level and was interpreting it and laughing with it and what it had to extoll, like a puppet’s mouth, like a ventriloquist doll. The cunt is the mouth of creation, the holy grail.
John Wisniewski interviews Sue Fox.
All the Answers and All the Power in All the Wrong Places
As with most Protomartyr songs, Scott Davidson and Alex Leonard (on bass and drums respectively) have spun tectonic plates on which to serve Greg Ahee’s angular, blissful guitar and Joe Casey’s vocals. Casey appears like a disgruntled college tutor that has snatched up the mic at a town hall meeting to denounce the corrupt, cruel, conservative citizens. He weaves about the stage barking poetry and intelligence into the room, which is received and reflected back by the surging crowd’s raucous voices and jabbing index fingers. There is something straightforward and righteous about Casey and the blissed out musicians backing him.
David Henningham on Protomartyr at the ICA in London.
Where the Intimacy Lies: An Interview with Polly Barton
People talk a lot about fidelity in translation: over time, I’ve come to see the kind of fidelity that matters as that of being faithful to the spirit of the work, its voice, rather than the individual words. It helps that this idea of a ‘literal’ translation is often either impossible or literally meaningless when working with a language like Japanese: I think that has contributed to shaking me free from the compulsion to always cleave as closely as possible to the precise configuration of words in the source, and to tap in instead to a broader conception of the holistic scene conjured up by the text, as read within its native context.
Polly Barton talks to Katy Wimhurst about her English translation of Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa.
Peekaboo Bosh
The book is dedicated to those who “risk their lives, their liberty, and their sanity in the defence of non-human animals” and it is perhaps the last of these sacrifices that most exercises King in this short but important work. In a system that imposes the “eternal Treblinka” conjured up by Isaac Bashevis Singer and to which King nods, staying sane is a difficult and lonely task which even the sociability of collective resistance cannot always assuage. Mental collapse is a recurrent theme, and King extends this exploration to the perpetrators of the horrors as well as those who protest them.
Ben Richards reviews Peekaboo Bosh by John King.
The Hunter’s Daughter
I thought, if Eleanor could just kill me, my dad would see my stepmother for what she really was: vapid, self-obsessed, manipulative. An ex-courtesan who ran the town’s first power plant, she was the last person I would have expected him to marry. I first met her when he invited her to our annual pig roast and the two of us spent an hour by the fire. After talking at length about the moral benefits of reading, she French braided my hair and wiped the dirt off my pants. I was nine at the time and admired this woman deeply—her beauty, her reserve, her manner of speaking. Everything about her contrasted with how I had grown up: days tracking deer and skinning squirrels, hauling water from the creek, sleeping on a straw mattress, dirt stuck under my fingernails, clothes stiff with dried sweat. I even went into town and bought ribbons so I could style my hair the same way, and I wore them every day while I worked.
A short story by Brianna Di Monda.
The Shape of Memory
Dr. Abubacarr Njie (placeholder name, as he was ferried by the Americans in 1945 from one continent to another, from one vessel of transportation to another, narrowly escaping Soviet spies in Germany by rail, spending several weeks in the western lowlands of Albania diagnosed with malaria, living incognito as Mr. Eduardo Alvarez, chief editor for Der Spiegel, residing in Argentina from 1949 to 1966, finally arriving in America under the guise of Dr. Abubacarr Njie, research scientist for the California Institute of Technology) died last month. Later in the month, I published an obituary of Dr. Njie in the local Pasadena Chronicler, describing him as a reserved man dedicated to his work and a humble father to two lovely daughters and a reclusive son. Then, yesterday, a muddy manila envelope containing two notebooks of differing sizes, shapes, and colors arrived in the mail, delivered from Dr. Njie’s home address.
A short story by Kevin Ye.
