The Escape opens with Raphael Haffner, 78, English, Jewish, lover of cricket, jazz and women, hiding in a hotel wardrobe to observe a young woman named Zinka have sex with her boyfriend. To observe her boyfriend Niko suck at her nipples. Haffner is a retired banker visiting this Alpine resort town to reclaim his dead [...]
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Tags: Adam Thirlwell, Oxmo, Tejal Rao, The Escape | 
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Sam Lipsyte is the poet laureate of the American loser. If there was any question about this before, his new novel, The Ask, has settled the matter. Lipsyte is the kind of comic writer who has his finger on the pulse of the most pathetic possible way of living in America at any given time. [...]
Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: Losers, Sam Lipsyte, Stephen Aubrey, The Ask | 1 Comment »
Jérémie’s dog was smashed against the rocks by one of those enormous waves that had been rolling in all afternoon—there had been a change in the moon. The dog’s skeleton had been battered to bits and its head reduced to a pulp.
Two other dogs were found, some cats, and a few cattle washed down from [...]
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“Roisterous Calliope”: Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower
“I got an understanding of how terrible love can be. You wish you hated those people, your wife and children, because you know the things the world will do to them, because you have done some of those things yourself. It’s crazy-making, yet you cling to [...]
Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: Christopher Buckley, Jeff Price, Review, Wells Tower | 1 Comment »
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Genius borrows nobly.
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Good poets borrow; great poets steal.
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Art is theft.
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Why is hip-hop stagnant right now, why is rock dead, why is the conventional novel moribund? Because they’re ignoring the culture around them, where new, more exciting forms of narration and presentation and representation are being found (or rediscovered).
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American R & B was enormously popular in [...]
Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: David Shields, excerpt, hip-hop, non-fiction, Reality Hunger | 4 Comments »
[Warning: May Contain Spoilers]
About midway through Gilgamesh: Ishtar’s Scorn™ — newly released for PC, Playstation® 3, and X-Box® 360 — Gilgamesh falls asleep and wakes to his sidekick, Enkidu, sprinkling a “magic circle of flour” around him.
“What the f*** is a magic circle of flour?” you ask.
It’s a good question. No one knows.
But [...]
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All fiction was about the same thing to Frank Wilder: the crime of his never having been published. Once a reader advanced beyond the great divide of 1945 to enter the furious stew of the modern moment, any novel, Frank felt, was fair game to be scorned. He thought often on the direction of American [...]
Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: fiction, Jeff Price, Pigeons | 1 Comment »
I’m in love with a shiksa—she’s right over there against the subway doors reading The Book Review—and there’s something between us. And I mean that in the worst way possible. You see I am in love with a shiksa who keeps getting farther and farther away from me. And it’s killing me! I mean it; [...]
Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: Flash Fiction, Molly Auerbach, Shiksa | 1 Comment »
His real name was Serge.
He used the name Francois when he was doing sex work. He was all over the Internet.
He was pretty but he wasn’t that good a fuck. Junkies never are. They want to get high. Not have sex. Sex is what Serge did for money.
He wanted into Cinematheque. He was a talented [...]
Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: Book, I Hear Voices, Memior, Tim Barrus, Video | 1 Comment »
We all knew the storm was brewing, just below the surface, because we’d seen one before—at least, I had—that is, I knew. Remember the absurd rivalry between ninjas and pirates, maybe about four years ago, probably five? With the wildfire phenomenon of Twilight and the recent publication of Seth Graham-Smith’s Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, [...]
Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: David K Wheeler, fiction | No Comments »
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