Thirteen was the year I discovered spite. Fourteen, eyeliner. Fifteen, seduction in a slow blink. At sixteen, I mailed seventeen birthday cards to myself, all unsigned. My mother asked who loved me th...

My dictionary of British slang tells me that “Sloane” was the first name of an insufferable female archetype of the upper class in the 1980s. When I saw that the protagonist of Audrey Szasz’s novel Te...

Thirteen was the year I discovered spite. Fourteen, eyeliner. Fifteen, seduction in a slow blink. At sixteen, I mailed seventeen birthday cards to myself, all unsigned. My mother asked who loved me th...

Since its release in fall 2024 Emmalea Russo’s Vivienne (Arcade Publishing) has had time to percolate with the culture it so sharply interrogates. A slanted satire, the book poetically autopsies onlin...

Since its release in fall 2024 Emmalea Russo’s Vivienne (Arcade Publishing) has had time to percolate with the culture it so sharply interrogates. A slanted satire, the book poetically autopsies onlin...

Murphy was visiting Malone. It had been a while since they had seen each other. Murphy being busy in the city, while Malone had lingered in the countryside. Murphy remembered those dark country roads,...

writer Nastya Valentine with books reviewed by Jack Skelley   Nastya Valentine – Cyberhorny: Navigating a Sexual Dystopia, and The Cyberhorny Dream Diaries: In Defense of e-Subjectivity (cyber-horny.c...

The hulk of the Orizaba lulled hugely in the calm spring water as if the waves were tongues tasting the air in broad gulps like old hounds lapping water from ground puddles. Not much moved. The poet w...

writer Nastya Valentine with books reviewed by Jack Skelley   Nastya Valentine – Cyberhorny: Navigating a Sexual Dystopia, and The Cyberhorny Dream Diaries: In Defense of e-Subjectivity (cyber-horny.c...

She filled out her first dating profile in a frenzied whirl, half-drunk on the yet-undigested news that her ex had brought someone with him to Thanksgiving that year. For a photo, she uploaded the pro...

Driving back after the funeral, he stopped at a Target to get Starbucks and take a piss. He’d stayed overnight at a motel, and he left the motel early in the morning to make it back east by driving all day.  Driving that morning he thought of the black and white picture of a Joshua tree in the room. It was the only thing not reusable in the motel; it was the sort of picture somebody would take in an intermediate photography class, not something tastelessly good the owners would get in a bulk purchase of decor.  There was something...

Nightmares come at night. The poster for Halloween III: Season of the Witch shows the silhouettes of three children walking in Halloween costumes against a red night. A ghoulish apparition evaporates ...

And if I do not keep moving, I will pass away. They call this ram ventilation, a shark’s way of breathing. My invisible gills demand the same method of survival. Since hatching from your womb, I have ...

I’d been in the Midwest a month. I had stepped off the Greyhound with clothing, toiletries, documents, and a cremation urn, which I kept my savings in. The locals considered my new town dead. At first...

Opening your eyes at night, unsure of where you are, half-dreaming, half-awake…staring into the darkness of a living room, thinking that the shadow near the door might be a man…or a coat rack… the tre...