Category: Previous Issues

The gun doesn’t remember you. The man you were was not important, nothing more than another in a series of shifting targets for the shouting hole of its small black mouth. Furthermore, you may have been a woman. Let’s say you were. It doesn’t make any difference to the gun. What matters is that the…

I stand at the foot of the Palace Mall and its opulent towers, capped by Muscovite-inspired domes, looming before wispy, distant clouds. It was built in three days this past summer. Absent, then present, like May flies, mushroom heads, etc. A cricket chirps so loudly in the dying boxwood adjacent to the parking lot that…

The title of H. Pueyo’s A Study in Ugliness & Outras Histórias cues the reader in immediately to its unique approach to translation by combining English and her native Brazilian Portuguese, “& Outras Histórias” being “& Other Stories.” The ten stories, translated by Pueyo herself, are presented with the Portuguese on the verso and English…

In the acknowledgments to Seth Dickinson’s new science fiction novel, Exordia, he says that it was “supposed to be a fun book,” and a look at the epigraphs does an unusually good job at conveying exactly what sort of fun this is going to be. From Michael Crichton’s Sphere, we can deduce an alien contact…

Some leftists avoid the term “late capitalism” because of its implication that we’re nearing capitalism’s end, running against our pessimism of the intellect, even as it thrills the optimism of the will. Nonetheless, it’s a term I’ve long been fond of because of its usefulness in distinguishing our current stage of digital info-capitalist saturation from…

Censorship brings luck. Incredible, but true. Dario Argento. His name alone conjures up terror, gore, bloodshed and chilling soundtracks. On 6 June 2023, the British Film Institute, in collaboration with Cinecittà, decided to pay tribute to the director with a screening of his films at the Southbank arthouse cinema. In the interview he gave to…

I read Indra Das’ The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar shortly after our non-fiction editor Karlo Yeager Rodríguez commissioned Shinjini Dey’s wonderfully insightful essay we ran in Issue #8. It was one of the best fantasy books I’d read in years so I was very excited about this interview. Indra spoke to me about everything from…

I butter the popcorn. I clean the butter machine. The bag runs out, and so I stick my head into its metal belly to screw in a new one. It’s a wet mess of plastic tubes and blood vessels inside there. The stench of congealing dairy blooms as I clasp and unclasp the nozzles. Before…

Back in your day they picked up hitchhikers, so you pick the man up. You could do with the company, even though he looks rough. Skin the muddy texture and fragrance of the dirt he must have been sleeping in, some nook in the rocks, the dirt smell a fond and clean smell, familiar to…

“The avodion has existed in some form or another for millennia: both the Chinese and the Arabs can point to possible predecessors. To this day the French still insist that the device and its practice were created by Saint-Just during the reign of terror when a cannon loaded with soap suds knocked a guillotine into…