Category: Interviews & Excerpts
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“Risking Chaos”: Marcus Pactor Chats with David Leo Rice, Author of The New House
David Leo Rice writes singularly weird fiction about the experiences of artists and drifters wandering hallucinatory landscapes. His latest novel, The New House, is a kunstlerroman focused on a child named Jakob, who trains to be an artist in a town of sentient dolls, blood clots who are sisters and lovers and advisors, and men…
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“There Was Always Something More I Had to Know”: Marcus Pactor Interviews Gabriel Blackwell
Gabriel Blackwell never repeats himself. Each of his seven books offers a distinct approach to fiction, bending forms and genres to find new angles from which to capture the dark absurdities of modern American life. His new novel, Doom Town, is the confession of a man who has no faith in the power of confessions…
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Exclusive Excerpt from And Yet, a book-length speculative essay by Jeff Alessandrelli
An innovative work of speculative fiction, Jeff Alessandrelli’s And Yet interrogates contemporary shyness, selfhood and sexual mores, drawing out the particulars of each through personal history, cultural commentary and the author’s own restless imagination. And Yet builds off the work of authors as disparate as Michel Leiris, Marguerite Duras and Kobo Abe, while quoting from and alluding to texts…
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“Genre and Selfhood and Speculation, Endless”: Jeff Alessandrelli on writing And Yet
I recently published a book that, like thousands of books, is nebulous vis-à-vis genre. And Yet is a book-length fictional essay. It’s a long prose poem. It’s an experimental novel. It’s a commonplace book with a wavy, fragmented narrative. It’s a work of eclectic literary collage. It’s autofiction. It’s nonfiction that’s more informed by the…
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“Trudging Through the Universe / As A Gigantic Lonely Eyeball”: An Interview with Gion Davis by Jeremy Boyd
Gion Davis’ debut poetry collection Too Much, forthcoming September this year, won the 2021 Ghost Peach Press Prize selected by Chen Chen and has been dubbed “wild and disrespectful” by Eileen Myles. In Too Much, Davis examines the self as a “gigantic lonely eyeball” wandering through scenes of abundance and hardship, creating a self-reliant and…
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“Finding the Ghost in Hoarded Objects”: William Lessard Interviews Kate Durbin
Kate Durbin’s art and writing have been featured in The New York Times, Art in America, Artforum, The Believer, BOMB, poets.org, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Her books of poetry include Hoarders, E! Entertainment, The Ravenous Audience, and ABRA, which won the 2017 international Turn On Literature Prize. In the following interview, Durbin discusses how…
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“Towards Love”: Cameron Finch Interviews Erin Stalcup
Erin Stalcup is a big-hearted human who writes novels with her blood. What I mean is that when Erin cares about somethings, someones—she goes all in. She is radical and boundary-pushing in all aspects of her life: writing, parenting, teaching. She naturally surges towards narratives that decolonize and invigorate readers to consider the many possibilities…
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This Is Symbiosis, a video performance for the 2021 Friends in Letters Memorial Fellowship
This Is Symbiosis is a deeply personal project they undertook to reflect on—and celebrate—their evolving friendship over time, through slice-of-life vignettes written by Brenna and accompanying illustrations designed by Ansel. The video incorporates a soundtrack for the piece, with keyboard accompaniment composed and performed by Brenna and audio recordings integrated by Ansel. In biology, the…
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“Numbering, Headings, Weird Animal Facts”: Gay Degani Interviews Lynn Mundell, author of Let Our Bodies Be Returned to Us
Lynn Mundell’s writing has been published in literary journals including Tin House, The Sun, Booth, and Five Points, and in the W. W. Norton anthology New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction. Her work has placed in the Wigleaf Top 50 Very Short Fictions, short and long listed between 2017 and 2020, and won the 2019 Lascaux…
Heavy Feather Review 