What’s a kurungabaa?

Words words words. Some more words. Some final words.

The Oregon Trail is…Life, Death, Love, and Dysentery

I’ve got a new article up on http://www.rantgaming.com. It’s a reflection on what Gregory Sherl’s book of poems, The Oregon Trail is The Oregon Trail, means for the future of literature. Also, there are a lot of free poems in the article that I wrote myself. I mean, I wrote the poems myself. And the […]

Tiny Pictures of Tiny Books

The digitization of the book-as-object has begun. Brena Smith, local stalwart of the bound and printed page at the CalArts library, has begun work converting the fruits of Literary Citizenship: Tiny Press Practices, or “Tiny Litizens” as the course is known among its cultish adherents, into timeless/ethereal digital artifacts (not the kind you get for […]

After Hours at the Otter Buffet

Online literary journal Prick of the Spindle recently published my review of Traci O’Connor’s short story collection Recipes for Endangered Species. The book–a dark goulash of zombie armadillos, prosthetic hands, crazed ghost-butchers, cocktail bar crooners and infanticidal cannibalism–often lapsed into hypnagogic beauty despite (or perhaps because of) the surreally magnified, occasionally self-animate flaws of its […]

And It Gets Weirder

When I was a kid, I had an anthology called Microcosmic Tales. Correction: my brother had an anthology, which I frequently, and eventually permanently, appropriated. It was exceptional in that the stories were selected by Isaac Asimov, whose name I knew despite having never read his stuff, alongside Martin Greenberg and Joseph Olander, whose names […]

Review: A Commonplace Book of the Weird

Several months back, near the end of 2010, my curiosity was piqued by an offhand mention, on one of my favorite internet haunts, to H.P. Lovecraft’s commonplace book: a list of unused story ideas and inspirations that survived his death. Following the bread-crumb trail of hyperlinks and innuendo, I eventually arrived at the site of […]

More @!$# Zombies

I thought we had an understanding. I thought I made it perfectly clear last time that I don’t…particularly…care…for…zombies! Yet here we are again: different day, same putrescent walking metaphor for vapid consumerism. This time, the kindly folks over at Innsmouth gave me the opportunity to review Paul Jessup’s novella, Dead Stay Dead. The publisher, Zombie […]