You can pick up a copy here, and you really, really should. If you like Wrong Station, it’s for you. Moreover, proceeds go to No More Deaths, which offers humanitarian aid to migrants at the US border. Read fiction, fuck fascism, solidarity forever.

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There’s an unproduced 4th Ilsa script, ‘Ilsa, Nanny to Royalty’ in my parents’ basement. It’s about Ilsa breaking out of the count of monte cristo prison and trying to seize control of a European micro-nation. Craig Russell from Outrageous (1977) plays the entire royal family, a la Kind Hearts

Drop me a DM if you want to come take a look at the place!

It’s a great space, and a fantastic community. I have personally moved EVERY PIECE OF FURNITURE there up and down AT LEAST THREE FLIGHTS OF STAIRS on THREE SEPARATE OCCASIONS now. If this act of faith won’t convince you the vibes are good, you’re beyond reaching!

I read MacLeod in high school and didn’t really care. Now that I’m older—now that I know what it is to work a physical job in chronic pain—now that I know what it is to watch my loved ones age and die—I think he’s maybe the best writer this country ever produced.

He’s interested in modernity, but not as critic or apologist. He elevates the strength & dignity of the men he grew up around but isn’t a Retvrn guy, because he understands their brokenness & misery. He’s found his way into a world beyond the meatgrinder, but can’t pretend the grinder doesn’t exist

M’s stories are often about men, but I think he’s the antithesis of the self-consciously masculine midcentury writers we all Discourse about. He’s just some guy. He came from the mine island, he worked the trees, & it sucked. It all just fucking sucked. There was myth & dignity, but pain most of all

More soberly, it’s tough to say why these stories are so good. The prose is beautiful—the storytelling feels so effortless I can’t say whether they’re meticulously structured or completely unrefined. A Taoism of raw timber & crude silk at work. But I think it’s the Truth that makes them sing.

You don’t want to read about how all Good Dogs must eventually either kill or be killed by their owners? You don’t want to drink tea that a crazy lady stirred with her one gross fingernail? U don’t want to watch your once powerful grandfather jack off in a barn?? Then go read American lit, asshole

Oh, you don’t want to read a story about how the narrator’s father has been ground down by labour & will soon die, his like never to be seen again in the world of neoliberal modernity? You don’t want to read about his relationship with animal semen?? SORRY BUD YOUVE COME TO THE WRONG PLACE

Thank you!

Not sure it really is a recommendation? Something about it appealed to my own idiosyncrasies—but I might feel bad about causing another human being to wade through it…

The text is About Things, but is ultimately mysterious. Maybe it’s only redeemed by a few strong paragraphs near the end. But it tasks me. I’ll probably try to write my own version of it someday.

I don’t think this is really a recommendation—the book’s long, often dull, and the characters are stock. But it lingers in my mind; the chord doesn’t resolve, and this means it passes an important test for me.

Simak’s kind of forgotten—he’s fusty & weird-in-an-un marketable-way & all his books are about wandering around Wisconsin. I have a soft spot for him, but this is the first time I’ve really paid attention to anything he’s done in terms of craft. Maybe I need to reassess my boy here

Which of course you should know—since the book begins with an argument about indigenous land rights in the US. ‘Oh, it’s about how we were the alien invaders, yeah, heard this one already’. But then you forget about it in all the Carter admin rigamarole. I think it’s a clever way to hide your theme

And then at the end there’s this rug-pull, where it’s suggested in an extremely creepy couple passages that the visitors are starting to print People. I’m not sure I really like the move, but it’s well done—after 200 pages of bureaucratic wrangling you realize it’s an alien invasion story after all

It’s cute the book’s about a crisis of capital, but is so locked into a cold war headspace that it doesn’t have the language to discuss this in anything but vague terms. It ends with the White House realizing they need to invent an economy based on human need, not profit—but never uses the S-word

It gets interesting for me when the visitors start printing flying cars, and then houses, because the last quarter of the book is about the White House panicking about what the end of housing & transportation scarcity means for the economy.