Cover photo by Maggie Lee; assistant: Alex McTigue; model: Jennifer Shear
 THE EARTHQUAKE IN CHILE
By Heinrich von Kleist
In Santiago, the capital of the Kingdom of Chile, at the very moment when the great earth tremors of the year 1647 struck, in the wake of which many thousands found their doom, a young Spaniard by the name of Jeronimo Rugera, accused of a crime, stood...READ MORE |
 URSULA K. LE GUIN
Any major science-fiction gourmand will tell you that Ursula K. Le Guin is among the most compelling writers living today. At age 79 she's also a renowned poet and essayist, but it's as the author of some of the more mind-warping sf and fantasy tales of the pa...READ MORE |
 TWO BY MIKE SACKS
Mike Sacks has written for Vanity Fair, Esquire, GQ, The New Yorker, Time, McSweeney's, Radar, MAD, New York Observer, Premiere, Believer, Maxim, and Salon. What, you think that's a lot? Well, he's also worked at The Washington Post, and i...READ MORE |
 WRITTEN IN THE WRITING
Graphologists Read Between the Letters
Sheila Lowe has been analyzing handwriting for over 40 years. She looks at one scribbled line and can tell you all kinds of secret stuff about yourself. It’s scary.
Vice: Are you a magician or something?...READ MORE |
 HOW TO LOOK AMAZING IN PHOTOGRAPHS
By Amanda Maxwell
Sometimes the world lets me in on its secrets. Not its important secrets, just its special little ones. The kind of secrets that help me to uphold a wonderful illusion of cleverness in the eyes of my friends and family
...READ MORE |
 STILLE NACHT
By Blake Bailey
When I came home for the holidays, my crazy older brother Todd-fresh out of prison-picked me up at the airport in Oklahoma City. Our mother couldn't come because she'd invited some friends for lunch and had to stay home and cook. In the crowded baggage area I ...READ MORE |
 UPWARDS AND ONWARDS
Edwyn Collins and His Birds of Recovery
Edwyn Collins is that cool Scottish guy who was the singer in Orange Juice. They were one of the best and most original British pop bands ever. He also did that song "A Girl Like You" which is pretty gay and has been used in a million commercials and movies, e...READ MORE |
 THE COMPLEXITIES OF THE HUMAN SITCOM
By Gus Visco
It was the future. Everything was designed to work independently, requiring no human intervention. Sitcoms included. They were conceptualized, written, digitized in SuperReelCGI—computer-generated images so real the human eye could not distinguish them...READ MORE |
 MARTIN AMIS
Martin Amis is one of the great writers of contemporary fiction. Even if he'd given up putting pen to paper after his third novel, Money, this would be an irrefutable fact. Period. Sorry. He writes grippingly of ugly characters consuming for the sake of...READ MORE |
 ICELAND MELTING
By Eileen Myles
Finally back in Reykjavík I was invited to go to Kristin's girlfriend's house and met her girlfriend's mother too. Though it was raining that day (as it did every day for two weeks straight on the second trip) the plan was that we would all go to the country a...READ MORE |
 VICE COMICS
By Michael DeForge
BAD EGGS
It Took Me Twenty Minutes to Muster Up the Courage to Eat One...READ MORE |
 HAROLD BLOOM
Harold Bloom is the preeminent literary critic in the world, and as such he is perhaps the last of a dying breed. Bloom adheres, passionately and single-mindedly, to the true and first tenet of lit crit-to take a book and judge it on its own merit, to see it a...READ MORE |
 INTELLIGENCE
By Seth Fried
I take a false tooth from my mouth in a diner, smash it open, and inside is the wrong microfiche. Expecting to find the Social Security number of the man I'm supposed to kill, I find, instead, inexplicably, the operating manual to a T-72 Soviet tank. I attend ...READ MORE |
 THE DEFENDER OF SNAKES
By Amie Barrodale
I thought of her as the defender of snakes. She was a German woman with shaggy, sandy blond hair. The first time I saw her, she was sitting with a group of paragliders at the Friends coffee shop. A snake charmer, dressed as a holy man, opened a flat wicker bas...READ MORE |
 IVOR CUTLER
In a perfect world everyone's grandfather would be a kindly yet razor-sharp old goof just like Ivor Cutler (and we'd also be able to fly). From the late 1950s onward Ivor wrote heaps of kooky poetry and children's books and composed little ditties that he woul...READ MORE |
 BAD DOG
By Robert Ferrigno
Dim Jim is late for work, staggering around trying to zip up his pants without cutting off his own dick, and I'm watching it all from the couch, still thinking about the cat I had to kill last month. Nice cat too. I'm a good dog, don't get me wrong. I'm not pr...READ MORE |
 FIRST NOVEL
By Sam McPheeters
How can I describe how it felt to complete my first novel? For me, the moment was a medley of emotion: relief, pride, closure. And sorrow. I was going to miss my quirky band of characters, all their pratfalls and gambling debts and incorrectly made chai lattes...READ MORE |
 SCIENCE FICTION'S HIDDEN HERO
Frederik Pohl Did It All, First
Screw Ray Bradbury and all his Midwestern sci-fi fame and glory. It's great that he gets all moony over rolling fields of grass, and sure he's a jolly read, but his characters never really tickle danger. Where's the fucking, the profanity, the evil? It's a bad...READ MORE |
 GOODBYE
By Simon Crump
In Dawson city men took to the hills to search for the arctic hare.
In the forest Michael convened a meeting with the three bears he'd shared a cave with all summer. They'd been good company, a little monosyllaballic perhaps, but...READ MORE |
 DISTANCE TO GALACTIC CENTER
By Gus Visco
With the arrival of the Well-Dressed Man, many people had questions. Many more had requests. Most people asked about his home world, Cephei Altory. Infatuated females sometimes asked about his true, nonhuman form. In public forums, military and political offic...READ MORE |
 WILD AMERICA
By Wells Tower
The bell on the cat's collar roused her. He'd brought her something: a baby pigeon stolen from its nest, mauled and draped on Jacey's pillowcase. The thing was pink, nearly translucent, with magenta cheeks and lavender ovals around the eyes. It looked like a h...READ MORE |
 SIX STORIES - PART 3
From a Novel in Progress by Kenneth Gangemi
The Two Feminists
As Nick was crossing 37th Street he heard a woman cursing. He turned west to see what was happening. Near the middle of the block he came upon two women struggling...READ MORE |
 SIX STORIES - PART 2
From a Novel in Progress by Kenneth Gangemi
The Pet Store
Nick joined a mixed group of people looking in the window. They were smiling at a litter of dachshund puppies, only eight weeks old, tumbling and playing. He loved...READ MORE |
 HARRY CREWS
Harry Crews is one of the most original and important living American novelists there is. He was born the son of sharecroppers in Georgia in 1935. He served as a marine during the Korean War and since then he's had just about every job a man might have to take...READ MORE |
 SIX STORIES
From a Novel in Progress by Kenneth Gangemi
High School Girls
Near Sixth Avenue a teenage boy was sitting on a stoop. He was reading a comic book, How to Eat Pussy. Nick smiled and stopped to write the title in his notebook...READ MORE |
 LES KRIMS
These manipulated Polaroids were originally published in the 1975 book, Fictcryptokrimsographs: A Book-Work by Les Krims (Humpy Press). It's incredible stuff, and good luck finding the book for under a jillion dollars now. But hey, lucky for you, we've ...READ MORE |
 THE FIELD
By Ann Beattie
The field across from our house stretches back about four acres, to a small outcropping of trees and bushes-mostly raspberry bushes, with goldenrod and other weeds mixed in. The field is irregularly bisected by a dirt road that leads to five or six cabins at t...READ MORE |
 SHEPPARD'S VIDEO-GAME PIE
By Stephen Lea Sheppard
STAR WARS: THE FORCE UNLEASHED
So. For those unaware. The Force Unleashed is the latest Star Wars game by LucasArts, in which you play (mostly) Darth Vader’s secret apprentice, Starkiller, during...READ MORE |
 A CONVERSATION WITH THE PORN RANGERS
A few months ago, I put my son to bed and headed to the den to look at some pornography on the internet. I put my headphones on and began to watch a hirsute man, probably early 40s, receive oral sex from a thin-lipped woman of commensurate age. The byline in b...READ MORE |
 THE PUTTI
By Will Self
To consider a mustache, or even a goatee, was, at his age, he knew, absurd-especially as his face lacked all the resolution needed to carry it off. Weak-chinned and horsey of top lip, Tom stood in the gloomy presbytery of Santa Caterina and let the Baroque int...READ MORE |
 MAX BROOKS
Anybody who cares even an iota about the state of the world and what happens to people when disease and wars happen should read World War Z by Max Brooks. It's a fictional oral history of "the zombie wars" and it ranks as one of my favorite books of the...READ MORE |
 FIRST THEY CAME FOR THE CEOS
By Lisa Carver
He put a ten and a five on the bar for six dollars of drinks. "They don't like that kind of tipping here," I said. "It's weird."
"Three dollars a drink, though?" he said, as if that justified it. "Do you know how much drinks cost where we went last night? Wha...READ MORE |
 SAD STORIES OF THE DEATH OF KINGS
From a Work in Progress by Barry Gifford
Roy's friend Magic Frank had a job cleaning up the Tip Top Burlesque House on Saturday and Sunday nights, which, because he began work at three-thirty of the following days, were actually Sunday and Monday mornings. According to the law, during business hours ...READ MORE |
 COUNTERFEITERATURE
Literary Forger Lee Israel Is Sorry but Not THAT Sorry
In the 70s, everything was tip-top for biographer and editor Lee Israel. Two best-selling books had allowed her the publisher-courted and martini-lunched bon vivant life of a successful writer. Then Israel's third book, an unauthorized bio of Estée Lauder, tan...READ MORE |
 CANDY-COATED
By Carlton Mellick III
Knob Tyler thinks he's the strongest, toughest, most badass motherfucker on Mill Avenue. Unfortunately, Knob has a lollipop for a head. This makes him not quite as badass as he thinks he is...READ MORE |
 LESSONS FROM THE LEARNED
Three Great Writers (Who Are Also Teachers) Give Us Their Unofficial Syllabi
Jim Shepard is the author of six novels and three collections of stories, the latest of which, the jaw-dropping Like You'd Understand, Anyway, won the Story Prize and was a National Book Award finalist. Besides writing heartbreaking, hilarious works tha...READ MORE |
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