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 our morning reading: short fiction by Brandon Taylor and Usman T. Malik, an interview with Werner Herzog, and more.
The Game of Stupid Poly
by Alex Behr
The Mad One keeps locking the bathroom door from the outside, especially when I’m in a hurry. “Tenth paper clip this week,” I say to her, my daughter, “And it’s only Wednesday.” I say it, like, no big deal. Paper clips are free. I take them from work.
The Mad One folds her arms and leans against the hallway wall. She whistles.
I don’t want to antagonize her. “Don’t you need to use the bathroom?”
In our weekend reading, interviews with Masha Gessen and Sarah Gerard, new writing from Veronica Esposito, and more.
In our afternoon reading: book recommendations from Douglas A. Martin, revisiting Peter Hujar, and more.
In our morning reading: thoughts on Kristen Millares Young’s new novel, an interview with Adam Wilson, and more.
In our afternoon reading: new writing by Patricia Lockwood, an interview with Alexandra Chang, and more.
The United States’ opioid epidemic continues to cost tens of thousands of Americans their lives each year. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that nearly 450,000 Americans died of overdoses involving opioids between 1999 and 2018, with more than 46,000 of those deaths occurring in 2018 alone. The crisis has personally impacted Rose Andersen, whose debut memoir The Heart and Other Monsters sorts through the past to better understand the life of her younger sister Sarah, who suffered a fatal drug overdose in 2013, when she was twenty-four. At the onset of this story, we are provided a disclaimer: Some of the events in this memoir have been fictionalized, imagined by the author in instances where she was not physically present to witness what actually happened. The invented scenes pertain to the nature of Sarah’s death; while Sarah was indeed a drug addict who died of an overdose, Andersen has reason to believe she was murdered, and in this book, she lays out the case.