Tag: Marcus Pactor

“Strange Juxtapositions”: Marcus Pactor Interviews Babak Lakghomi

Babak Lakghomi’s disturbing fiction builds intensity and paranoia with its constant suggestion of growing but never-fully-seen darkness stalking beneath the muscular prose. His latest work, South, is a strangely seductive dystopian novel. In it, a journalist named B. is asked to report on labor strife in a distant region of his country. But his interviews…
“I Cherish the Act of Sentencing”: Marcus Pactor Interviews Lance Olsen

Lance Olsen is one of America’s most formally inventive and intellectually stimulating novelists. Few writers have been as consistently excellent over the past thirty-plus years. In that time, he has evolved from a cutting-edge sci-fi writer into a wizard of form and narrative, infusing his singular works with poetically imaginative language as well as a…
“A Hallucinatory Clarity”: Marcus Pactor in Conversation with Angela Woodward

Angela Woodward works both unlikely and widely known history into her slim fictions. In her new novel, Ink, she weaves together (among other things) the origin of PDFs, the transcripts of Abu Ghraib detainee testimonies, the life and work of Francis Ponge, and the strangely moving lives of typists. The result offers a brief, memorable…
“Cheers to the Weirdos!”: Jesi Bender Presents a Heavy Feather Favorites List for 2022

I’m a sucker for a year-end list. I love seeing what people enjoyed, adding to my TBR, and discovering new titles and authors. However, I also suffer from a very particular, what-some-have-deemed-“weird” taste. Given this affliction, I wanted to create a list of suggestions from authors who share my penchant for more experimental or innovative…
“The Posthuman Realist”: An Interview with Steve Tomasula by Marcus Pactor

Steve Tomasula is a literary pioneer of both prose and page design. Those designs transform the vast depth of his cultural and scientific research into uniquely satisfying aesthetic experiences of our historical, present-day, and future worlds. His new novel, Ascension, features research notes, drawings of real and hypothetical creatures, and a variety of online links…
“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…
“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…
Begat Who Begat Who Begat, short stories by Marcus Pactor, reviewed by Maxwell Malone

Marcus Pactor’s sophomore short story collection, Begat Who Begat Who Begat, explores the deceptively complex topics of mundanity and domesticity through experimentation in both rhizomatic storytelling and narrative form. Over the course of the collection’s 122 pages, Pactor presents 17 stories situated just left of reality. Across varying subjects, such as a toilet that transmutes…
“Back Alleys and Hidden Corners”: Marcus Pactor Interviews Brian Evenson, Author of The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell

Brian Evenson has for many years been one of America’s chief practitioners of innovative dark fiction. His work regularly adopts and breaks free of sci-fi and horror tropes. It captures our oldest fears and bleakest futures in admirably hard, detached, concise prose. It freaks me out, and I love it. Among the numerous plaudits for…