Chapter 35
Joselyn told me to return to the East Estate and explain all that had just happened to Butler in great detail and to not spare anything. It seems he is the caretaker of the Arto family in every aspect, not just their living quarters and leisure.
Today, we’re pleased to present an excerpt from Eugen Bacon’s new collection A Place Between Waking and Forgetting, set to be published later this month. Its publisher, Raw Dog Screaming Press, describes it as “dark speculative fiction, an Afro-Irreal collection in which transformative stories of culture, diversity, climate change, unlimited futures, collisions of worlds, mythology, and more, inhabit.”
The past looms large in Ian Maloney’s novel South Brooklyn Exterminating — both through the novel’s setting in the recent past and the ways in which it invokes the rich literary history of New York City. It follows several years in the life of its protagonist, from his childhood assisting his father in the field of pest control to his gradual awareness of unsettling truths about their family. I spoke with Maloney about the novel’s genesis, its evolution, and writing about a part of Brooklyn that isn’t always in the spotlight.
In John Madera’s debut fiction collection, Nervosities, heavy concepts—diaspora, transversalism, the over-saturated and over-stimulated post-industrialized world Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man could only have dreamed about—are woven by Madera into human stories with such subtle, virtuoso touches, that Nervosities becomes much more than an objet conceptual.
Chapter 34
The failed blood sibling episode was one of the first videos we ever took down.
It fell within our criteria of obscene. Although, it is a public discourtesy to obscure any information, so we had to do a shitload of covering our tracks to avoid any public outrage.
Only on special occasions and this was a very special occasion.
Tobias Carroll’s fifth book, In the Sight, is a hip dystopian road novel. Farrier is the main character, and we follow his travels through roadside motels, eateries, gas stations, bars, retail locations, and secret reading rooms and societies across a futuristic American landscape. In the Sight was inspired by Destroyer’s 2002 album, This Night, and we trail after Farrier as he dispenses a mind-altering product which can change the trajectory of your life. A revision of life is what the product delivers. At first, I wondered if I was heading into Huxley’s Brave New World territory, or a new age reboot of Kerouac’s On the Road, but in a more nomadic picaresque journey. Rick Moody’s hilarious Hotels of North America even crossed my mind as well, early on, as I tried to figure out where Farrier was going and what he was aiming for in his journey. None of these truly fit what I found in this novel. We learn that Farrier and his friends Edwin Hollister, Lopez, and Erskine, all share a similar discontent about the lives they’re leading in university. Edwin names what they’re after: “Reincarnation…but without the death part.” The group experiments with DIY brain science alterations, which allow the recipient to begin a new life. Edwin partakes, revises himself, and sets off never to be heard from again, by Chapter 5. You wonder how many times Farrier has done the same.
Renowned microfiction author Joseph Young put out his new flash fiction collection The Thing I Was Trying to Tell You in June, and the collaborative children’s book Rocks: What Are They Doing also came out in June by artists Christine Sajecki and Michael Mäke. They got together for an amusing and enlightening conversation about their books, their process, and what art means to them.
Chapter 33
Streaming is genius because you get paid to share something the customer never owns.
Joselyn does market research and chooses who we promote on the front page. Morgen assists. It’s very clear Joselyn now has the Arto empire more than Morgen ever did. I’ll go with the last woman standing. Just don’t make me come out of retirement.