In his “new,” read untethered, life, Dante’s Vita Nuova solidifies a hierarchy of poetry and criticism by placing the sonnet first followed by a prose description of how he wrote it, separating...
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did you touch my english
did you detach my english
did you debrief my english
did you break my english
did you english with my english
did you fool around with my english
did you ask my english for favors<br...
Imagining the next four years—let alone two hundred—often seems daunting and bleak; not so for novelist Jordan A. Rothacker, whose most recent work visualizes a far different distant future.
Jordan Rothacker is a writer based in Athens, Georgia, where he received his master’s degree in religion and PhD in comparative literature at...
I want this book to encourage people to write the same book about Boston, LA, or Berkeley. Chicago or Atlanta. And make people read, reread, and more deeply understand works of African American literature.
My friends didn’t understand that my problem was not that I didn’t have gut feelings, but that I had gut feelings I couldn’t trust.
Allow me to begin with a disclaimer. Michael J. Wilson is a label-mate of mine from Stalking Horse Press, which published my short story collection, Gristle: Weird tales. While Wilson and I have never met in person, we are friends on social media and...
The New York City art scene can be described in one word: pretentious. So let’s get as unpretentious as possible, and clarify that term with The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (my dictionary of choice), which defines the word as “making an exaggerated outward show, ostentatious.”...
This is the second time I’ve interviewed James Reich, and it is good to catch up with him after the publication of his newest novel, The Moth for the Star, released in late 2023 from 7.13 Books. This haunting and masterful novel takes the reader right into the heart of “dark Modernism,” a territory...
In The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot, the urban sub-chaos softly closes with the image of the Arthurian Fisher King, sitting upon the shore, waiting for his chosen successor, wondering “Shall I at least set my lands in order?” In his slim yet cinematically plot-driven novel, The Moth for the...
When I was a little kid, my father coming home from work was an event we looked forward to every day. We’d all follow him, Mom, my brother Michael, and me, into the bedroom and watch him take his clothes off. First he’d take off his shirt—he always wore a white undershirt that he never removed—then his pants. He wore white Jockey underwear. The long ones. I don’t think they were called boxer...
The art of taking the divine throne is in its grandiosity. The question asked of a new messiah is, “How big can you make yourself?” In addition, perhaps, “How colorful are you?” “How much are you willing to suffer?” “For how long can you keep the narrative going?” And, foremost, “How will you survive a mutiny?” For Petra Caldwell, these queries are not posed outright, though they are necessary in...
In James, slaves speak in slave language in front of their masters to appease them or—as said on the first page, and a theme repeated throughout the novel—to “give white folks what they want.” When slaves are alone together, they talk in erudite English. In this way, they have their own secret language, one they perform for white people. (. . .) This hiding of their true selves, and the...
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