Tony Rauch is an author of absurdist, whimsical, and Bizarro short fiction. I’ve enjoyed his work a lot. You can read my review of his latest collection, what if i got down on my knees?, over at Medium (originally it was reviewed at the now-defunct Adventures in SciFi Publishing): https://medium.com/@benarz13/book-review-what-if-i-got-down-on-my-knees-by-tony-rauch-b310cd5d8a47 Ben Arzate: Introduce yourself. Who
Ben Schneider has been an active duty maintainer in the military for 15 years. At 41, he has seen his fair share of the world, having traveled to Italy, Japan and Korea, among others. The exposure to various people and cultures has inspired the ideas behind his comic strips. Airman Artless is a series of
Bret Easton Ellis sales are pretty rare, but here’s one that features what is possibly his most famous work. American Psycho is a complete nightmare, and entirely required reading for anyone who likes dark and strange fiction. PKD was one of my favorite authors for quite a span, and this book is still one of my favorites
Few albums will hurt you this bad. After the release of Daughter’s masterpiece, You Won’t Get What You Want, which stole the album of the year slot for “The 20 Best Albums of 2018” on this site, it would be reasonable to suspect that the world of experimental and dark music might take a while
by Ben Arzate Before there was Tao Lin’s Taipei, before there was Douglas Coupland’s Generation X, before there was Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero, there was Ryu Murakami’s Almost Transparent Blue. “’A lot of things happened awhile back, right, but now I’m empty, can’t do anything, you know? And because I’m empty I want
by Ben Arzate Matthew was once a keytar player for a synthpop band. After he got his girlfriend Karen pregnant, he was forced to marry her, get an office job, and move to Suburban Hell. He keeps his keytar, as much as Karen wants him to get rid of it, and jerks off over
Review by Bob Freville An official selection at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, Isabella Eklöf’s Holiday tells the story of Sascha, the goomah of a small-time drug lord. When we first meet Sascha, she is walking through an all-white airport, the noisy footfalls of her hot pink peep toe slingbacks a cacophony that seems to
One of my favorite quotes is by singer and songwriter Macklemore. “It’s up to you to turn the pen into a machete and make sure that every beat that you meet gets killed.” I try to live by this line. It’s a perfect representation of what every author, filmmaker, singer, and songwriter strives for. A
The opening poem is a clever little lick based on the tune to “Off to See the Wizard” from The Wizard of Oz. The second features an interesting palate of shifting perspectives, but I haven’t been able to dig further yet. Helen Dewitt’s fiction reads sort of like David Foster Wallace’s, and I’m sure it’s a
by Bob Freville I had largely given up on Punk ever since pop-punk acts like Avril Lavigne and Good Charlotte co-opted the label and bastardized it. But every now and again, I come across an artist that puts things right and calls out the many wrongs of the genre. In recent years, acts like The
