The guiding principle of Six Ridiculous Questions is that life is filled with ridiculousness. And questions. That only by giving in to these truths may we hope to slip the surly bonds of reality and attain the higher consciousness we all crave. (Eh, not really, but it sounded good there for a minute.) It’s just. Who knows? The ridiculousness and question bits, I guess. Why six? Assonance, baby, assonance.
Author Chelsea Sutton’s Krackle’s Last Movie, out now from Split/Lip Press, is one monster of a novella – a post-modern Prometheus, if you will (you don’t have to).
The book itself is a patchwork of found footage, oral history, and the inner thoughts of our reluctant protagonist, Harper. It’s the story of a mentor gone missing, a tragic death onstage, and interviews with “real-life” monsters whose lives glance, sometimes violently, off the human world. As she splices, rewinds, and reconstructs Krackle’s decades of encounters with werewolves, mermaids, invisible dancers, and desert sea monsters, Harper finds herself piecing together truths behind her own life secrets, as well as those that led to both Krackle’s disappearance and the Great Merlan’s last trick.
My introduction to Ruyan Meng’s work came via her novel The Morgue Keeper, which follows a man named Qing Yuan — the titular morgue keeper — who becomes fixated on one of the bodies that he encounters. (Literary Hub recently published an excerpt.) Soon enough, his interest in this case (which reminded me a bit of Derek Raymond’s harrowing I Was Dora Suarez) takes him to increasingly unsettling places. I spoke with Meng about this novel’s origins and the moments in history that she seeks to chronicle.
Much of Aaron Burch’s writing explores the myriad ways our past affects our present. Now, over two decades after founding the indie lit journal Hobart, and after publishing a novel, a novella, an essay collection, a short story collection, a craft anthology (and numerous short stories and essays, plus founding two additional literary journals), Burch is back with Tacoma, an autofiction novella that takes themes of nostalgia and the past to a wild new level.
It’s the classic writer’s dream: publish a book, win an award, write the screenplay, and then walk the red carpet at the film version’s premiere. During 2025, Ben Shattuck’s creative life appeared to reflect that dream exactly: his first work of fiction, The History of Sound, won the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature prize and the film version — for which Shattuck wrote the screenplay — debuted at Cannes.
Leora Skolkin-Smith is one of the major and most original female voices of contemporary American literature. Born in Manhattan in 1952, she grew up between New York, and Jerusalem, which led to a split, and sometimes painful, vision of her own identity.
I’m Adam Szym, cartoonist of many years and of late a hobbyist screenwriter. Last September my graphic novel Little Visitor & Other Abductions, a collection of three sci-fi horror stories connected by the theme of alien abduction, was released by Oni Press.
What does translating the follow-up to an internationally beloved book involve? That was the question that translator Yuki Tejima faced when working on Tetsuko Kuroyanagi’s book Totto-chan, the Little Girl at the Window: The Sequel. We spoke with Tejima about her process and the legacy of the first volume, along with an excerpt from the book in advance of an event this weekend in New York City.