Francesca Wade’s new book, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, has been cause for some good writing about Stein recently. I have most appreciated Adam Thirlwell’s LRB essay “Devotion to the Cut” (more about Stein than about Wade’s book) and Ryan Ruby’s Bookforum review “In Search of Lost Stein”. Reading these pieces made me […]
The following is of very niche interest. It began as an email, but then blossomed (metastasized!), because I was annoyed … and nothing propels me toward obsessive productivity quite as much as annoyance does. In summary: The selection of critical essays and, especially, the bibliography in the last two editions […]
Today, my latest book is released: Moon Songs: The Selected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, with a foreword by Kelly Link. The book collects 19 of Carol Emshwiller’s 150 stories, strange tales of aliens, animals, and humans, stories of war and apocalypse, of ordinary life made extraordinary, of beauty and ugliness interwoven […]
In March 2024, I wrote a post declaring “There Is No Ethical Use of AI”. My point was not that you should not use AI. Personally, I try never to use it, but it’s getting more and more difficult as so many electronic products now don’t give you much option. […]
This summer, I have mostly stayed away from writing and instead focused on replenishing myself with reading — and, to further that replenishment, letting go of any feeling of obligation that I write about that reading. So I’m not even going to mention it here! But a couple of pieces […]
1. In September 1986, Pedro Lemebel (1952-2015) put on high heels, painted a hammer & sickle over half his face, and walked into a meeting of communists and leftists in Santiago, Chile to speak one of his earliest pieces of writing, a manifesto of being and difference: I need no […]
One book can change your life. Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway was officially published on 14 May 1925 in Britain and the United States, making it 100 years old today, although it had a long gestation — Woolf wrote about a character named Clarissa Dalloway in her first novel, The […]
Arthur Machen’s 20th century writings are simultaneously fascinating and frustrating. These days, if Machen is known by general readers, it is not for the relatively more recent works, but rather for his extraordinary writings of the 1890s (even if some of them were not published until later): “The Great God […]
The Mountain Goats’ album The Sunset Tree was officially released on April 26, 2005, which means it’s now 20 years old, and I have been a die-hard Mountain Goats fan for 20 years. The Sunset Tree is not the first Mountain Goats album I heard — that would be 2002’s […]
And you may ask yourself, “Well, how did I get here?” … Same as it ever was, same as it ever was Same as it ever was, same as it ever was Same as it ever was, same as it ever was Same as it ever was, same as it […]
1. Director Justin Kurzel’s latest feature film, The Order, tells the true story of a group of white power terrorists in the Pacific Northwest who killed Jewish radio “shock jock” Alan Berg, bombed porn theatres and a synagogue, counterfeited money, robbed banks and armored cars, and planned other attacks and […]
I have made my story “Where’s the Rest of Me?” available on this site, and there are ePub and PDF files of it to download for anyone who prefers reading that way. The story was first published in my collection Blood: Stories (Black Lawrence Press, 2016) and was reprinted in Wilde […]