What happens when you blend a loving portrait of Memphis, speculative and uncanny elements, and some gloriously pulpy imagery all into one highly compelling work of fiction? Well, you might get Nine Bar Blues, the new collection from Sheree Renée Thomas. Thomas’s collection resonates on its own frequency, moving from moments of wonder to those of terror and back again. I spoke with her about the origins of this collection and how she created such a powerful work.
Chris L. Terry’s second novel, Black Card, is a lot of things. It’s an immersion in one city’s punk scene, a thoughtful consideration of its narrator’s struggles with questions of identity, and an unsettling depiction of aggressions both micro and macro. Terry writes about music from his own experience, and there’s a memorably lived-in quality to Black Card, even when Terry takes the novel in more stylized directions. With the paperback edition of the novel out now, I checked in with Terry to discuss the book’s genesis, its relationship to punk, and what the (Young) Pioneers have to do with any of this.
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.
The online journal Big Other turns 10 this year. Tony Trigilio checked in with Big Other founder John Madera for a look back at the last decade, thoughts on the current state of literature, and what the future of Big Other might hold.
With Fake Moon, Alban Fischer explodes our bitter menageries of personality, suspect remnants of a once-touted humanity, dearly holding on to America the beautiful with shrewd self-interest, severed hands. From “Human Arsenal”: “All the statues of this country are homeless / They’ve taken to begging in the streets for change.”
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.
In his debut novel, Nine Shiny Objects, Brian Castleberry peels back the veneer of a rosy, postwar America, exposing the messy inner workings beneath. The novel is divided into nine hefty sections, each with a different protagonist whose life intersects in one way or another with a mysterious UFO cult. The book begins in 1947 with Oliver Danville, a small-time Chicagoan hustler, who, after witnessing a murder and reading about a strange UFO sighting, feels compelled to head west to investigate. Danville eventually establishes a group called “the Seekers,” and what follows is one chance encounter after another, as the story wends from coast to coast, spanning four decades, and all the while explores the limits of utopian dreams and the reactionary forces poised to strike them down. A whole world populates this richly woven novel: farmers, rock stars, city folks and suburbanites, a poet, a salesman, a conspiracy radio talk show host, and more. This is an American novel with heavy American themes, and at the same time, Castleberry reveals the humor in the absurd. In an email exchange, the author discussed with me some of these themes and how the book came to exist.
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.