Left Behind
November 02, 2021
The Build Back Better Act makes families a bargaining chip.
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The Well-Upholstered Nightmare
November 01, 2021
We first see it emblazoned upon the book’s cover, and then once more on its opening page: a resplendent photograph of a mid-sized Spanish Colonial at dusk. Light appears to travel through the image somehow—a quality derived from a long exposure time—receding as the ...
Fresh Hell
October 29, 2021
Jackass: The Emoji
Following yet another round of ruthless pruning, the provisionally definitive form of President Biden’s domestic spending bill emerged late this week. Shorn of a billionaire tax, a corporate tax increase, paid family leave of any duration, a clean ...
Sincerely, from Some Other Side of the Mountain
Short fiction by Adrian Van Young.
Edith Wharton’s Hauntology
October 27, 2021
Knowing and unknowing in Wharton’s “tales of the uncanny.”
My Enemies Defeated Me / For Nothing
My enemies defeated me, led me downhill,executed my horse, and made me watch.My enemies defeated me, sold my mats, rugs,and colored rosaries at the bazaarto merchants and traders in shadows.In the dark my friends betrayed me.My children saw the hyena laugh outside our window.At ...
The Florida Projects
October 26, 2021
There’s no shortage of places to call home, if only for a little while, in Florida’s Osceola County—plenty of sumptuous McMansions await vacationers on secular pilgrimage to the Magic Kingdom, and Jimmy Buffett-themed timeshares enable visitors to buy into their own ...
Fresh Hell
October 22, 2021
Why You Gotta Be So Mean?
Earlier this year, rumors began to fly that Pfizer, enabled by our wondrous intellectual property regime, might possibly have been bullying governments in Covid-19 vaccine negotiations. The multinational conglomerate, it seems, not only wanted liability ...
Festival of Fear
The Jaipur Literature Festival serves as marketing for an increasingly repressive India.
The Novel According to Bezos
October 21, 2021
Has Amazon changed literature?
The Never-Ending Story
October 20, 2021
Storytelling amid the ruins in Joy Williams’s “Harrow.”
Fresh Hell
October 15, 2021
The Nightmare of History
Generally speaking, “history,” as it’s taught to children suffering through our glorious public education system, has tended to accept that the Holocaust—during which, it might be recalled, some six million Jewish men, women, and children were ...