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Fiction

The Perpetually Barking Man in the Best of All Possible Worlds

Abdel-Chakour waited a moment longer, then left the café and wandered down the streets at random. He felt humiliated in his entire outsized being. It was a great humiliation, equal to his standing. It filled him completely. He buttoned his baggy canvas jacket in an attempt to cover himself.

In Your Element

Rich wrestled into place the steel strapping, crafting a hand forged bracket to join the two TVs hauled from dumpsters he’d stacked atop each other, then drove down two bolts. Now he could watch the game.

Neither Madame, Nor Mademoiselle

He looks me right in the eye, with an air of bewilderment, like I’m dimwitted, or as if I’ve insulted his mother.

inSerial: part seven
Delusions of Being Observed

I was thirty-two when I met Natalie. My twenties are mostly a blank. More one night stands than I can count. Books. Papers. Long nights in my room smoking cigarettes and reading till my eyes dimmed. Some nights I smoked a joint to put me to sleep. I was thirty-four when I met Robert on the subway. At that age, Melville had already written Typee, Omoo, Mardi, and, of course, Moby Dick. It’s possibly the greatest tragedy of American literature that he did all this work and no one cared. A few people cared, but not many. Thirty years after he died. That’s how long it took for people to take him seriously.

LOST AND FOUND ANIMALS a misplaced bestiary
Part 7: Caswell's Inkfan Lizard (polyphonia metamorphica)

In the realm of deception few animals have managed to disguise themselves as well as Caswell's Inkfan Lizard, a hardy breeder in the deserts of the Southwestern United States.

an extract from
The Fifth Wall

forthcoming May 15, 2017 from Black Sparrow Books / David R. Godine The air is dry and dusty, with wind flapping violently through open windows, the sun baking the truck’s hot black metal and steel. The highway opens onto a wide expanse of desert sagebrush, barrel cacti, and dogweed.

excerpts from
Gnome

out now from Black Sun Lit When you look intently at the landscape, it imprints itself on your face. You see the world with your entire face, with the entire physiognomy. Physiognomy’s not only the sense of an entirety, the shape of a discrete thing in the mind, where inner and outer coalesce, but also the sense of the remainder that surrounds that discrete object.

Easter Sunday

I was four years old. We drove to Richey's Market for the big kids Easter egg hunt.

In Conversation

New Routes in Fiction
A talk with Jonathan Lee

Jonathan Lee’s masterful High Dive is at once a high-minded political novel and an interrogation of how it feels to fail, to stagnate, and of the moments of grace that can occur within stagnation.

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The Brooklyn Rail

APR 2017

All Issues