Much like the jazz music it took as its inspiration, the original Cowboy Bebop wove together several genres – noir, westerns, space opera – into an effortlessly cool whole. There’s a certain looseness to it, with a few tentpole episodes that delve into Spike’s, Jet’s and Faye’s tragic pasts, but the remainder are much more…
Tag: Locked
Posts that are for Patreon’s only.
The Sterility of Safe Fiction: Who Are We Protecting? by Raquel S. Benedict
Think of your favorite work of fiction. Describe it in one word. What is it? Romantic? Dark? Mysterious? Thrilling? Psychedelic? Sexy? Hilarious? Bittersweet? How about safe? When you think of your favorite work of fiction, a work of fiction that changed you, a work of fiction that will stay with you until you die, the…
“A Love Letter Template for the Little Scholars” by Howard Tseng
Dearest ___, Time is an illusion imposed by the single-minded husk, beyond which you are everyone and everything and everywhere, all at once. You are a Marxist roaming a continent, a rebel breaking out of an island, and a Loyalist trapped on a tiny little rock, iridescent, a pearl’s semblance. Though impoverished as children denied…
“What It’s Like” by Riley Tao
…and my penis is growing out of the back of my throat, and it’s choking me, and Sarah says, “I mean, of course I wouldn’t be comfortable if I had a penis growing out of my mouth, but it’s the body you were born with, you should be used to it,” and Mack nods and…
“Housekeeping” by Sally Parlier
The only thing that kept me from gnawing Ellie’s face off some days was that sharp taste she had. Her blood was like Windex sprayed over rust, and I could only imagine it’d be like barbed wire in her flesh. Sometimes when she picked at her scabs I’d be vacuuming up the smell days later….
“Reno Walled City” by Naim Kabir
I use Hac this time. They name themselves Sev, Jen, Timor. The chloropin in our shots smells like bleach and tastes like the swelling bag of a breached lithium battery. I blink once and we’re at a spouthouse three floors up and through a maze of concrete hallways, sucking paste through nozzles. Tastes like glutamate….
Interview with Joe Koch, Author of The Wingspan of Severed Hands
Hi Joe, it’s a pleasure to have you here. Your story in this issue, “Eating Bees From The Ass of God”, is suffused with a kind of aesthetically repulsive sexual body horror. Where did the idea for the story come from and is this aesthetic something you consciously wanted to explore? Hi Jonny, thank you…
Digital Publishing and the Infinite Now by Kurt Schiller
It should be apparent from even the quickest of glances that online publishing is sick and dying. Not that you would know this from publishing’s centricity to culture, especially on the internet. Google, Facebook, Twitter—the media titans of the modern day depend on digital publishing the way a mill needs a stream. More than 4…
NFTs, Marxism, and Enclosure: The World’s Most Dangerous Fan Club Card by Jess Levine
The most immediate myth to dispel about non-fungible tokens (NFTs) is that they have anything to do with art. The relationship between an NFT and a work of art is much like the relationship between a cereal box-promotion fan club card and the musical artist to which it attests the holder’s unparalleled admiration. The NFT…
Disaster Queers and the Troglodytes Who Mean Them Harm by Eric LaRocca
I’ve often referred to myself as a “disaster queer.” This term is not intended to be self-deprecating, but rather explains my relationship not only with literature but with the world in general as well. Being a queer person, I see the world through a decidedly queer lens. I’m always extraordinarily suspicious of openly queer authors…