It smelled like banana because she was eating a banana. This one was mottled brown, a decaying penis of a decaying day.

She had gotten fired. This was the third job in a row now. I don’t have much hope left, her mother signed. I always worried you might not amount to anything. Might as well just come on home.

She wished she could be home then, in the damp kitchen with the ceramic bowl of strawberry bon bons and the mouse skeleton in the oven and the dried blood on the fridge and the cluster of maggots in the bin and the crudely excavated Delft tile mantlepiece.

Her older sisters (twins) still lived at home, helping their mother with the business. She had gone off to college in New York, thinking she was better than them and their watery bloodline. She had succeeded for a while, mostly by rendezvous-ing with decrepit New York folk who told her she glittered like a stolen jewel. One woman, Carol H., courted her for a short while after they met in line at Zabar’s Deli. Oh please, you’ve just got to come to my place, she said. I’ve got a Felix Gonzalez-Torres installed in the foyer. At the time, she had only known of foyers from reading Better Homes & Gardens on the toilet seat. Whyever one desired a liminal space between entrance and interior, she’d never understand. But Carol was good to her, fixed her shrimp toast and Rooibos tea before loosening her robe and unveiling her crepe-like body, ready to be devoured.

As she sat on the cold concrete steps outside her most recent employer, she thought of the people who deserved a goodbye. There weren’t many, probably fewer than 6. After living dozens of different lives in New York, she barely had anything or anyone to show for it, only memories that ballooned and bubbled under her skin. She would miss especially the feeling of swaying in the tall buildings she briefly worked in, blades of iron grass in the wind coming off the East River.

She dropped the wet peel on the pavement and got up to leave. Then she slipped

.

December was hot in Louisiana; the sun curled swathes of cornstalk into a patchwork of death. They had spent the day driving around, not talking, not even stopping to use a bathroom, just listening to music nonstop.

Be quiet, big boys don’t cry

big boys don’t cry

big boys don’t cry

big boys don’t cry

big boys don’t cry

big boys don’t cry

big boys don’t cry

It was so much music, so many different variations of sound, that language stopped making sense and floaters sparked dully in her brain. At one point, passing a cemetery of confederate soldiers, she hit the power button hard enough it left a dent on her palm. He turned his head like a barn owl, inspecting her with eyes that were all pupil.

At sundown, they finally pulled into the parking lot of a Waffle House, a beautiful establishment she had yet to experience being from a coastal city. An actual tumbleweed blew across her feet. A girl who looked to be 14 came to take their order and it all felt very Lynchian; she almost expected a little person to appear from under the table. When the food arrived, she accidentally poured sugar onto her eggs instead of salt. He looked at her with accusatory pupil eyes again. Big boys don’t cry. She thought she might.

In the bed, he was a pale cold bone in her arms.

Tell me what your house growing up looked like, she asked, running her hand through the head of curls.

You met me at a very Chinese time in my life, he replied.

They finished the bottle of wine and ran up and down the hallway, screaming so loudly the neighbor came out with a rifle. She had never felt more in love.

Sprinting out of the restaurant, she entered a hot rainy night. The evening had been, for better or for worse, a complete disaster. A nefarious tingle coursed through her veins, prickled at the bulbs of her hair. But ultimately, there was nothing to be done about it now.

People were always reminding her of her faults— she was always reminded of how flawed she was! It’s what John had done the entire dinner: picked every so daintily at the scab of her wounded psyche. The salad, a cluster of undressed bitter leaves, arrived as he was musing on her relationship with her twin siblings.

“I just think you ought to consider how hard they’ve had it growing up without both parents.”

She blinked.

“I mean, you had the blessing of experiencing them both and it’s as though you blame them for your mother’s death! I’ll never understand it.”

He sipped his wine thoughtfully. She continued to chew in silence.

The waiter noticed that something was amiss each time he came to clear a plate or refill a glass. She yearned for him to save her, to realize that she was a baboon trapped in an animal testing facility. But he wasn’t there with her, not really.

She met John the year prior in a laundromat. A revolting New York meet-cute, but a meet-cute nonetheless. He approached her for a dryer sheet, asking to ‘borrow it and bring it right back’. He was averagely handsome and strikingly tall, a trait that automatically made him more appealing.

At the time, she had just started seeing a new analyst, a woman on the Upper East Side who held sessions in her Gilded Age sitting room. She feared to admit she was seeing her simply to experience the grandeur of that room once a week, to transpose herself to a time where domesticity and subservience were the only things expected of her. The analyst thought she ought to “see what this fellow was all about.”

John asked if she’d like to go for a bike ride along the river. Truthfully, she hated biking, hated any motion that involved her feet leaving the ground. But she agreed, because her analyst knew what the Id wanted.

Right off the bat, she felt simultaneous great unease and comfort around John. He was gratuitously charismatic, considerate, and manipulative. He exhibited cataclysmic qualities in a future partner that greatly seduced her to a point where, she told her analyst, she was beginning to slip. The analyst listened intently to her recall when John told her that a shadowed past was always bound to unearth itself, that her job at a prestigious firm couldn’t possibly withstand a past like that.

“What I’m seeing here is a manifestation of the devil on your shoulder, so to speak. An energy that feeds on deep set insecurities and fears. If we’re to look through a Lacanian lens at toxic masculinity, he represents the scope of the antithetical father,” said the analyst.

“I don’t follow,” she replied.

At the table, the waiter brought out the main course, seared duck breast with clementine confit. It looked revolting and she wished to projectile vomit all over the crisp white tablecloth.

“All I’m saying is, I love you and want the best for you. And that translates in part to treating those around you like they matter.”

Suddenly, everything began to buzz. Her head began to spin; the mouths on the signed celebrity headshots on the wall began to open and close maniacally. She looked down at her hands, could see the bones through the skin. They belonged to some animorph. What’s happening to me? TO ME?

John’s fork scraped against the plate. He looked lovingly at her and smiled.

“Enjoy your trip.”

As she confessed, Alice got her period.

“Bless me Father, for I have sinned.”

Alice didn’t know to make the sign of the cross before speaking, for she was a Jew. The wet denim of her jeans squelched against the bench. She pictured the fate of her underwear— soaked to the brink of use, a fecund token of shame hanging from the shower head.

“Speak, my child.” The church was new, probably built in 2015, which made it seem less holy. Instead of stained glass there were blocky panels of metal and vinyl. But it was close by, and some friends in AA met there, so she knew it must be a legitimate place of worship.

“I’m not a good girl, Father, if you catch my drift.” She chuckled a bit, uncomfortable in the dampness of her crotch. There was silence from the priest. “I mean to say, I’m a bit of a sprite? I have this unquenchable urge to get my way no matter what it takes.” Alice coughed. The blood was now staining the wood of the bench.

“What do you mean by good girl? Have you been having intercourse with a married man? Looking at your phone too much? Please, extrapolate.” She liked him, this priest. He really knew what he was looking for.

Alice wasn’t there confessing of her own will. It was her mother’s idea; to find a spiritual place of atonement and get some things off her chest so she wouldn’t call so often and complain about things entirely within her control. Her mother was a good girl, a good woman, and couldn’t understand why Alice refused to grab herself by the reigns and control herself.

Someone walked in then, into the new build church in New England, and suddenly Alice realized she couldn’t stand to be there any longer soaking in herself. She thanked the priest and hurriedly left the church, emerging into a disgusting day orange from wildfire smoke. Walking home, she stopped at the butcher for a thick steak. Her roommate would be furious, always making snide remarks about her crude cooking habits. She subsisted on primordial foods, meals seemingly prepared for a zoo animal: spears of sardines, crooked chicken necks, liver and kidneys, little quail eggs from the Asian market. Hardly ever a vegetable or a fruit. Coffee was her pleasure. The more void of flavor, the better.

Having forgotten momentarily, she remembered the great seep of blood on her backside and used the steak bag to cover herself. She would tell her mother that she took care of business, because frankly, she had done her best. The first step is acknowledging you have a problem. The door was wide open when she arrived home, and the indoor-only cat was sitting on the porch licking its paws.

“That was quick,” her roommate said without looking up from her copy of People magazine. She had a habit of stealing old copies from waiting rooms and nail salons, crinkled pages shrieking the decrepit scandals of the 2010s. Alice wished then that she could peruse her father’s collection of Great 21st Century American newspaper covers: September 11, 2001: Day of Terror! We Got Him- Osama’s Downfall! The Virus Is Coming— Look Out! These exquisite markers of her short life made her feel formidable.

“I feel emptied of everything. Maybe I should convert.” Alice flapped her arms and the cat bolted down the front steps. Her roommate snorted. She had grown up a devout Catholic, excommunicated from her family when she chose to attend liberal arts college. They had been housemates for 10 years, and had no plan to live alone anytime soon. Neither one of them had procured a partner in the time since college, and had snuggled into the idea of cohabitating well into their 30s.

Alice went upstairs to her bedroom, a modest room with a big bay window and bare cream walls. They had gotten the house for an exceptional rate because it was notoriously and undeniably haunted. Each night she felt the presence of something moving through the thin walls, soothing her to sleep. Alice feared nothing, not after what had happened, and found great comfort in the idea of asilent companion.

In the bathroom, she removed her bloodied jeans and underwear and threw them in the bathtub where they landed with a heavy slap. As the bath ran, the water turned a beautiful shade of pink raspberry and she dipped her fingers in. It was the same color as the sky on that evening at the lake.

That time of year, clouds of mosquitos skimmed the water like fat bubbles and the ducks swam right through them. Alice liked to walk to this lake more than the popular one because the beach was stone, not sand. There wasn’t anyone else at the lake that evening, which was odd because it was still hot out and back then, you took advantage of the hot weather. After a while there was a rustling that echoed across the lake and Alice sat very still. A man appeared, and he had a woman thrown over his shoulder all slack. Maybe she was tired, or didn’t want to walk on the stones, Alice thought. But then the man walked into the lake with her and she wasn’t moving and Alice started to feel like maybe she shouldn’t be watching. The man walked into the lake up to his shoulders and heaved the woman into the water and she was gone. Then he retreated, shaking out his boots. Right before he disappeared into the brush, he turned and looked straight at her.

That was ten years ago. She never told anyone. Maybe one day she would tell the priest. Tears were running down her face into the tub. Never again would she be aligned in this exact moment in reality and she felt a great crest of sadness.

A meow came from below the window.

Semiotics aside, she couldn’t align with the flippancy of the following phrase:

What makes us happy is not to get what we want.

But to dream about it.

Was it to imply rank melancholia, a festering wound beneath crepe-like contentment? This statement, made by a Slovenian philosopher, was the precise classification of gruff cynicism gurgling within her at all times, ready always to spurt foamy streaks of cold, wet dread.

Flickering lights on an ocean’s horizon, parking lot seen through a thicket after a long hike— always the opaque essence of a grasp, pearlescent Technicolor buzz of Glinda’s bubble on the cusp of a pop.

As she sat nursing warm wine, she felt like cotton candy in water: a pink, powdery clot curdling in her blood. All around there were bodies, sticky and vibrating. Hoping. So many dreams lately, but her memory was faltering. These dreams, said her analyst, mean nothing. Unless you want them to. Unless. She chuckled into the drink, sour pearls dribbling down her shirt. What did she want from them, these glamorous visions?

A man approached the couch, her couch, sheets of hair down to the waist. He looked at her curiously, a stare that was both indulgent and appraising. She stared back, thinking that he broke the continuity of the present moment, his clothing and features as though from a world no longer welcome.

“Hello.”

He said it far too quietly for anyone but her to hear; she watched his lips encircle the word as it escaped his mouth.

She continued to stare at him, confused that she was visible; she was searingly disappointed to be extracted from her private, perplexing realm of questions without answers, information without knowledge. Far too much time passed before her response, so much so that she had to call after him as he walked away.

“I’m sorry, I couldn’t speak. Hello,” she said.

He turned slightly, an incredulous murmur undulating on his face.

He spoke while standing: “I felt I should say hello. I couldn’t tell you why, I wouldn’t necessarily say I’m attracted to you. Not to say you aren’t attractive, at least by conventional standards. Anyways, I simply felt the will. Like a Quaker, or something.” He sat down with sandbag bones, slow and heavy.

She experienced a flare of contempt at the tinny lilt of his voice, his archaic features, particularly his resolute confusion as to why he wanted to introduce himself. They both turned then to address a pattering noise coming from the bar windows. Small pebbles of hail jumped off the window; simultaneously, burnished leaves twirled through the air. The miasmic cluster fuck of organic occurrences nudged her sharply in the direction of contempt.

It wasn’t his blatant insult regarding her physical facade, but the ignominious scurry back at her response. She was unaccustomed to male receptivity and reciprocity; in most engagements with her father, at least, they would each approach a conversation with the vast indifference of lions post feed.

“That’s very kind. If you’ll excuse me,” she said.

She took a cigarette case out of her bag and went out into the little courtyard. She could hear his big loping steps behind her, a sound that was almost endearing. The hail was still pummeling down and they were alone in the courtyard, the air was moist with urine. She passed him a cigarette between bullets of ice.

“Nice and biblical, isn’t it.” He coughed on the smoke.

It was then that she could take in his full person, examine this body under the brash light of her judgement. Thin Romanesque nose, black t-shirt with the words RAISED IN CAPTIVITY emboldened across the chest, performative work pants worn nowhere near a tool.

“Do you think your dreams mean anything?” she asked.

He was eager to respond, eyebrows squiggling in anticipation. “Oh, definitely. I’m always discussing them with my analyst— he thinks they’re the window to our presence in a higher spiritual realm. Anytime I have one about farm animals or technology I know there’s about to be some sort of seismic shift in my life.” He was proud of his answer, taking an uncomfortably long drag on his cigarette as though sucking it clean of air.

The hail had finally stopped and several bodies had migrated into their veldt. They stood in silence awash in the soft murmur of others in the courtyard, feeling enchanted by their foreignness to one another.

“I’m pregnant,” she said. “Nine weeks.”

An emotion eclipsed his face but she couldn’t determine quite which one. He smoked the cigarette down to the filter, continuing to suck it even then.

“Are you happy?” he asked finally.

She smiled at him.

“Oh I’m thrilled. I’m absolutely bursting with happiness.”

Lately, I’ve been asking a lot of questions.

Alana thinks it’s annoying. “You never give me anything,” she protests. “You only take. All questions, no answers. You’re like the inbred cousin of the Oracle of Delphi.” Should I take offense?

I don’t remember what caused the spike in my curiosity. It began last summer, as I lay sweating on bumpy grass in the park with someone I used to love. Maybe it was the thick heat, but I suddenly got the urge to do odd things: lick wet cement, eat handfuls of moist soil, rub the bumps on my nipples until I felt an all-encompassing cocktail of despair, dread and nostalgia (women who breastfeed sometimes experience this, called milk dysphoria). But then I guess that morphed into one ultimate desire. To Know.

It feels good to not reveal anything about my life, like I’m keeping myself in tact. I relish in my anonymity, and genuinely love that my inquisitive, UwU demeanor overrides any tactile qualities of a personality. I’m a walking question mark, anchored only by the information I am bestowed.

I spend the day calling every Duane Reade in Kings County to find one that will fill my Vyvanse prescription. On the subway home, I engage in my favorite past time: browsing the profiles of women on Instagram with gargantuan breasts and prepubescent bodies. I find their freakish proportions mesmerizing, reminders that the digital terrain will always be a cybernetic replica of the animal kingdom. Each time I discover another abnormally proportioned e-girl, I get the same rush as finding a Dr Wall bone china tea plate in Goodwill.

While scrolling, I imagine I’m the young daughter in The Veldt by Ray Bradbury, standing statue-like in my Playroom surrounded by large-breasted digitized waifs swaying in a circle. I long to lay my head on their bosoms, feel their arrhythmic heart beats skip against my temple.

I sense another pair of eyes on my phone screen, which seems like a breach of some unspoken oath, but I realize quickly that the woman next to me simply can’t help herself. I sympathize with her, and subtly tilt my phone so she has a better view of the waifs. She wears a large bow in her hair and unwraps a log of Sweetarts, one of which she offers me with a grunt. I think of what my mother would say; how the chalky residue is undoubtedly fentanyl, and did I know the Nazis saturated the drinking water of pre-war Germany with methamphetamines?

I accept her token, a sturdy little coin dropped from dry, dirty fingers.

“What’s your favorite kind of refined sugar?” I ask her. “Mine’s dextrose.” She looks at me with a lacquered stare and I feel the bloom of cold, deep fear realizing that I won’t always get an answer.

At home, I run a bath and set a bowl of unwashed blueberries on the floor. I never wash fruit anymore; I’m privy to the flavor of pesticide dust. I like to take baths two, three, sometimes four times a day. I call Cleo, who I usually have to call four to five times in a row before they pick up. On the fourth try, I reach them.

“I chewed off my skin tag today,” Cleo tells me.

“Do you have any idea what a ‘consultant’ actually does? Like on a daily basis?” I ask.

Our conversations don’t last too long, which is what I love about our friendship.

I get out of the bath, and stand dripping over the bowl of blueberries. The bathwater is speckled with debris: soggy crumbs of the pancakes I ate while bathing earlier in the day, flakes of skin I peeled from my lips, little nests of hair I pulled cheese-like from my head.

I beam. My own aquatic Pollock.

After a woman turns 30 in the 21st century, it seems inevitable that she’ll want to write about getting older because, at the end of the day, what else is there to talk about besides inching closer to demise and the sagging of skin flaps? At age 26, I’m still a significant four years away from an itch to discuss motherhood (thank god) followed by periomenopause, as in the vein of Sheila Heti and the Band of Merry Millennial and Gen X Mothers Grappling with Existential Girlbossery.

I often wonder if I’m deliberately obtuse and cynical just to annoy other people, but surprisingly, Miranda July’s bumbling naiveté and jolly imbecile spirit warmed my heart like a cauldron of organic grass soup. Her latest cusp-of-menopause, coming of middle age novel All Fours is a masterclass in wealthy, white artist cretinism.

The semi-successful and humbly famous protagonist is a woman in her mid 40’s with an apathetic husband, a nonbinary child, and an over abundance of spiritual akathisia. After receiving a $20,000 check for a copywriting tagline, the narrator decides to take a solo road trip from LA to New York to usher in the next phase of her life— i.e., gird her loins for what’s next. After packing up her car and kissing her demure, listless family goodbye, she sets off on her journey. She finds herself driving through Monrovia, a beautiful Californian oasis of strip malls and dead pigeons, where she stops to get gas. At the station, she encounters a sexy young man named Davey (yes, like the pirate) who works at the local Hertz branch. Determined to insert herself into his orbit, the narrator sets up camp in the Motel Excelsior, where she decides to spend the entire three weeks she would have been in New York. She spends her $20,000 check on renovating the entire motel room to become a gorgeous replica of a suite at Le Bristol in Paris: sumptuous crushed velvet, plush cream towels, tonka bean body butter, marble topped writing desk. The rest of the novel follows her romance with Davey along with a bevvy of other bodies, weaving between the grasses of nauseating sexual drive and the yearning for connection.

Miranda July is funny. She really is. I seem to be late to the game with that take, but believe me when I say she knows how to seduce a chuckle. A favorite line: The future itself was another lover, reaching backward in time to cup my balls. Instead of dangling in the present I was held, I was safe; I was gently squeezed and aroused by my never-ending preparations.

All Fours is the perfect doomsday novel.

It’s been a while since I’ve written a review, mainly due to a summer lull in reading and a dusting of mental enervation. But, I’m able to read again, and sit with someone else’s voice in my head for more than ten minutes before getting up for a pacing hiatus. The book to sweep me back into the tempest was Drifts by Kate Zambreno. The unadorned cover was what drew me in at Unnameable Books, along with the fact that I knew Zambreno had been published by Semiotext(e), a publishing imprint I trust to endow me with esoteric knowledge.

Zambreno’s greatest talent is her ability to evoke the sensation of a suspended bird in wind. Drifts is a feminine Sebaldian passage through late capitalist space time. Needless to say, it appealed to me immediately, and Zambreno’s sentences imprint on you before you can realize they’re in the past— syntax sleep marks. At its core, Drifts is the account of an artist living in New York thinking existentially about staying productive and turning in her novel on time. What fascinated me most about this work while reading it was how it was such a realistic, meta account of Zambreno’s time writing Drifts, that it didn’t seem possible to be categorized as fiction. But, as in the lane of Sebald, Knausgaard, and Tokarczuk, quotidien reality and history are intrinsically interchangeable. Zambreno connects her productivity efforts to Rainier Maria Rilke’s of the early 20th century— Rilke traveled all around the world before he was able to finally forget himself and write his great works.

Drifts is transient, alienating, fractured, and mostly, boring. But, boredom isn’t something to streak through as quickly as possible to get to the other side. Zambreno illustrates in magnificent fashion how sitting on the porch on a hot summer day while attempting to write something, anything, that makes your existence worthwhile, is an essential mechanism of ‘the drift’. Aimlessness and wandering are core components of human drive, and it feels refreshing to have that reflected in Drifts, rather than being directed down the path of plot with a strategic arc and definitive ending. It’s completely understandable why many would deem Drifts and auto fiction in general too self-indulgent and esoteric, but is writing not for communicating one’s experience to others by entering their mundane internal dialogue via words on a page?

Hari Kunzru’s new novel Blue Ruin is about peril and the volatility of the contemporary art world. But, it is also about return. Like a snake consuming its tail, present ingests past and a man is confronted by the life he once lived and left behind. Kunzru is a master of seamlessly blending art, current affairs, politics, and the ontology of existence.

Set against the backdrop of the coronavirus, this is a story that successfully preserves space from current events while remaining poignant and relevant. The result is a novel that is timeless, rather than temporal. Jay was an artist once, in his youth, but the London art vanguard gnawed him to shreds. He chose to leave the art world behind and travel, pulling up any roots that might gain traction and give him a sense of home. Years later, struggling and in poor health, he is delivering groceries during the height of the pandemic to a secluded manor in upstate New York. He is a concave shadow of his former self— he lives in his car, having been evicted from his derelict studio after getting covid, and works various gig economy jobs to stay afloat.

Pulling up to his next destination, seats damp with bags of melting salmon and yogurt, Jay’s past bolts out from the shadows to strike. Standing on the porch is Alice, his lover and muse from 20 years earlier. Alice left Jay for Rob, a fellow artist, and they married, living out a moored, rational existence while Jay journeyed the globe, attempting to fill the hole of her absence with experience and time. Jay is weak recovering from the virus and overwhelmed by the sight of Alice that he collapses. She decides to hide him in the guesthouse on the edge of the property and over the course of the next several weeks, Alice keeps Jay a secret from Rob, and the former lovers take walks in the woods and discuss art and existence. Ultimately, Alice is just a detour on Jay’s path, no matter how much he wishes she were the destination.

Blue Ruin is a beautiful love letter to the quiet moments and purity of human connection. It pricks you with sentiment and nostalgia and is refreshingly grounding.

There are few things as romantic as a mid life crisis in Berlin. In Germany, dichotomies seem to abound prophetically— thick heads of hair/thinning crops; clubbing in your twenties/gallery hopping in your thirties; East/West; wieners/ schnitzel. Past and present tango sensually, romance and horror embrace, and walls keep chaos from bleeding into order.

For Sam, the affecting leading man in Eric Schnall’s debut novel i make envy on your disco, walls have always existed— he just hasn’t seen the other side until now. Sam is a gay Pacman suffocating within the lanes of a prison of his own creation. A successful and renowned art dealer, he’s expertly crafted a Linkedin perfect life for himself—Demure townhouse in an affluent Brooklyn neighborhood, sexy (cheating) boyfriend in real estate, roster of clients daft enough to spend millions on airport artwork. After discovering his partner’s affair, Sam decides to travel to Berlin alone to survey galleries and report back to Soho, or, the Land Where Art Goes to Die. While in Berlin, Sam meets a cohort of mildly distasteful yet ultimately endearing characters including Magda, an insolent hotel concierge who sighs indignantly at Sam’s every inquiry and ultimately confesses her pregnancy out of wedlock to him, and Jeremy, a random client’s nephew living in Berlin who cries during sex and takes multiple baths in Sam’s hotel room.

One can’t help but feel contempt for Sam’s dissatisfaction with his life—after all, he built the walls himself, each new level exacting and tactful. But as he limps aimlessly through the platz’s at dawn, mourning the life he could have lived, I began to feel fondness, and then fear. Sam is a part of us all, lamenting about the different routes he could have chosen, places he could have lived, people he could have loved, that would have reconfigured his position in his labyrinth of self-inflicted ignorance.

The thing about walls is that they have always and will always exist, no matter how hard we try to dismantle them. Some people take the longer route, others resort to anarcho-communism, and many accept their fate to remain on one side. While Sam decides to return to his life, the fact that he was able to see what was on the other side feels hopeful nonetheless.

Anne De Marcken’s latest from Fitzcarraldo is a specter novel, a tale that lingers and echos with the suction of a footprint in wet sand. It is Candide-like, a spare odyssey of a nameless, wispy heroine in the afterlife. Like walking through a dream, It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over is puzzling and peculiar, disorienting and nonsensical.

My first impression while reading was how unmoored I felt, much akin to a loose boat in windy waters. I noticed I was strangely out of control, as though I were grasping at clouds, and I found myself growing frustrated that I could not ‘follow’ the narrative or ‘understand’ the slippery transitions between settings and characters.

I realized the slim volume is an ideal instance of something artistic that is not particularly enjoyable but compelling. As a typical consumer of media, I am the first to admit I want to listen to and read things that I Like. But is the point to relish these mediums, or remain receptive to external forces and allow things to permeate us, regardless of whether or not they bring us pleasure?

There’s only so much time, as indicated by the title, and if a book fails to resonate, should we “waste time” by finishing it? Because the novel is so short, the title feels suitable and almost coy. De Marcken writes with a puppeteer quality, gleefully perplexing both heroine and the reader, and like The Phantom Tollbooth, it strikes a pitching balance between profundity and play.

Acts of Desperation is, evidently, an account of a desperate woman. We walk around in constant fear of ‘desperate’ people (woman in particular), people who would do anything to fill up the hollow cavities within them that expand with each year of life. It’s frightening to be in close proximity to people who are too ‘in need’ of something, whether it be food, or love, or purpose, lest their desperation rub off onto us and unravel the tightly bound threads of therapy or self-awareness.

Megan Nolan caught my attention due to her similar writing style as other contemplative UK female writers (Ali Smith, Rachel Cusk, Claire Louise Bennett). I love a good story about a wallowing, late 20’s/early 30’s woman on the brink of an existential breakthrough, and Nolan didn’t disappoint with Acts of Desperation.

Like Karl Ove Knausgaard says on the cover, it’s “a love story like no other.” That’s not to say it’s a swashbuckling, singular story that no one’s heard before, but it’s distinctive in its luxe indulgence. What I mean, is that Nolan has written an entire novel solely about a woman’s toxic dynamic with a man. There are some elements about other aspects of her life (her relationship with her father, her friendships with former classmates), but for the most part, the entire story tracks the evolution of their dynamic. There is no plot, no direction, no light at the end of the tunnel while reading this, but somehow, you can’t stop.

She spends an exorbitant amount of time musing on her need for male sexual validation, her obsession with her boyfriend’s ex girlfriend, and the dismal reality of needing to find other things to think about besides sex and dating. These are all very real and common components of the female psyche while engaging in a romantic relationship with a man, and the stark lack of shame Nolan’s protagonist possesses will cause you to wince, then applaud. Her prose is rhapsodic and soaring, and although nothing much happens, you’ll find yourself addicted to this woman’s pilgrimage through malignant male waters.

Winter in New York is like hiding in shadows. You feel like you’re dying faster. Everything that is happening is, in fact, happening, but also not— a reality splintered with theatrical invasions. Autofiction is the literary equivalent of reality rippled with the make believe components of our innately childlike imaginations. Innocent amelioration of the past is something endearingly human.

Bret Easton Ellis is the original sovereign of autofiction and his latest work, The Shards, is peak Ellis-maxxing. Shards follows Ellis’ real high school experience in the 1980’s as he and his peacockish friends navigate the sex, drug, and murder filled Brutalist landscape of Los Angeles. A new student, Robert, joins Bret’s class senior year, the same time a serial killer called the Trawler gains notoriety. When one of Bret’s classmates is murdered, Bret suspects Robert, who is handsome, haughty, and shady. As Bret tries to convince his friends of Robert’s culpability, he transforms into a hollowed husk of paranoia, shame, and lunacy.

Buckley school— early 20th century Hacienda-style classrooms, terracotta-tiled hallways, arches framed in bougainvillea— is the perfect foundation for the garish deterioration of Bret’s reality. The hypnotic repetition of languid drives from Malibu to Sunset, Mulholland to West Hollywood, are described so richly and so often, they make you squeamish. By the end of the novel, you’re expecting the worst around the next blind bend on Benedict Canyon— a deplorable, odious “something” that never happens. While the Trawler’s role is to glaze Bret’s lavish life with a malicious sheen, their worlds never actually collide. Everything quotidian, from Bret’s hookups with his male classmates, to hot weekend days diving into Hockney blue pools with his friends, is soaked with unbearable dread for what horrific thing Robert might do.

What’s most effective in Ellis’ writing is his ability to adorn his main characters in gaudy, flashy qualities (i.e. Patrick Bateman) that distract the reader from the most interesting character of all- Ellis himself. As the latest addition to Ellis’ body of work, Shards acts as another example of his self-dissection. In a way, each of his books is a contribution to Ellis’ greater ‘experiment’— an autofictitious investigation into each grim crevice of his psyche.

Ellis isn’t only proving he’s a great writer with Shards; he’s also his own therapist.

What is a city without a story?

A house without eaves; a dark, motionless traincar; sodden earth lacking crust.

It matters that places have stories— otherwise they wrinkle up, hollow and barren, shells of extraction and exploit.

What city possesses stories like New York? Its streets practically buzz with narratives, so compact and charged that the cement cracks and converges. It takes every ounce of fortitude not to slip between these cracks.

20 years ago, art collective Bernadette Corporation collaborated on a fiction piece titled Reena Spaulings, intended as a succinct encapsulation of the turn of the century, post 9-11 psyche in New York City. Superficially, this novel is a one dedicated to New York, not so much about it. It lays bare the city’s vaporous, labyrinthine temperament that repeatedly swallows and regurgitates a twenty-something woman trying to come out victorious against the swell.

Our protagonist Reena, (who is more entity than person) is a security guard at the Met. One night, while at an underground nightclub, she is scouted by a creative director who makes her the star of an underwear campaign. Instantly, the city morphs Reena from someone whose purpose is to watch, into a subject of the gaze. Once Reena is a star, she and the creative director collaborate on a play of Dionysian proportions, chronicling the destruction and chaos that is life in the bowels of New York. This is “a book written by images, about images, to be read by other images.” It is not meant to ‘make sense’- rather, it functions as nonconsensual media exposure, like the reader is sitting chained to a chair and forced to consume. It is filled with disquiet and evokes the sensation of being watched. We feel as though Reena is everywhere, all seeing, all knowing. She embodies everyone and everything in the city. She is the Young-Girl manifestation of the panopticon, watching and absorbing.

Ultimately, this novel is schizophrenic and surreal, constantly emphasizing the importance of the Hyper New. “As for the order under which we lived, everyone knew what it was: Empire was staring you in the face. That a dying social system had no other justification for its arbitrary nature but its absurd determination- its senile determination- to simply last.” Sentences, characters, concepts dissipate into the ether as soon as they are introduced in the book, similar to that face on the subway you’ll never see again after the doors suction shut. Reena is the most physical impression of ephemerality; just as we feel we are beginning to understand her, she vanishes.

There’s no one quite like the Post-Modern White Male Artist.

I am in the process of moving to Brooklyn and recently was hit with overwhelming dread about the amount of people there who take themselves very seriously when it comes to art. I maintained a similar wariness during the first few chapters of Matthew Binder’s Pure Cosmos Club but ended up heartwarmingly surprised.

Paul, an odd, newly single artist in Brooklyn stumbles bewildered through a Quixotic melange of exhibitions, parties, and cults with the same gummy smile as a newborn. Chaperoned by his dog Blanche, a quiche-obsessed incarnation of the feminine subconscious, Paul is an Allbirds-donning red flag. After quitting his 9-5 to dedicate his time fully to art, his girlfriend leaves him and his life begins to deteriorate. This was why I feared the book would descend into the lit fic equivalent of The 48 Laws of Power, a kind of New Age warning about the dangers of succumbing to the seductive bosom of bohemian life. Paul then meets a beautiful mathematician who is married to the Musk-like leader of the Pure Cosmos Club, a cult with a similar slogan to Equinox about ‘transcending human experience’. Paul ultimately sacrifices the entirety of his soul to the club, all while earnestly chirping motivational phrases:

“The mind is never ready for seismic events. We must listen to our heart!”

“You were able to remake yourself using your jealousy as a strength!”

“From here on out, I vow to make every decision in life with the utmost care!”

However, Paul’s complexity surprised me. While on the surface smooth and sheep-like, his interior reveals a rotten blastocyst. Usually, the reader is able to relatively predict what decisions the protagonist will make depending on their moral compass, but the beauty of Paul is that he is void of any compass at all. Even his art lacks interrelatedness. Paul is an exquisite investigation into the unpredictable mind of the Dunce. He is the one who stops to accept the free sample of snake oil serum; the one to remain on the line of a spam call from China; the one to despise Trump and worship Biden. He embodies the ridiculousness of the cultish nature of the art world itself, and the delicate ingenuity of the modern confederacy of dunces that renders you speechless and unsure whether to laugh or weep. PCC is a subtly ingenious and hilarious narrative about the insidiousness of the sheep mentality.

Among them are libertarianism, dating-app voice recordings, and Getting Canceled. I’ve ventured down many a path promising ego death in a world soaked in the fluids of the Self. In these endeavors, I’ve found that personifying the holy and righteous Jester is a method of cutting through the sludge. Lexi Freiman concurs. Her latest novel, The Book of Ayn, is a sharpened ax to grind against the throngs of virtue signaling NPC’s that bare their gem-encrusted teeth at satirical humor.

The Book of Ayn is a Objectivist’s Odyssey of sorts. Freiman’s protagonist, Anna, is a mid writer in her late thirties on the precipice of eternal damnation— she wrote a satirical novel about the opioid epidemic and rural working class America. Subsequently, she was dubbed a classist and canceled by the New York Times (which to Ayn, might be considered an honor).

Anna realizes that although she is a privileged, liberated woman of the 21st century, her soul is as void as a used tampon applicator of any substantial belief other than edge-lordism. She is so lost that she finds herself indoctrinated into Randian philosophy in order to curate her Self.

Newly invigorated by Ayn’s encouragement of dissent, Anna moves to Los Angeles where she is commissioned to write a show about her Russian-baddie idol. She is surrounded by content creators and second wave feminists, and ultimately gets re-cancelled when she triggers the cast of a show. When the money and the virtues of cancellation dwindle, Anna escapes to an ‘ego suicide workshop’ on an island in Greece.

This is not Great Literature. It’s meant to entertain, and entertain a humorless audience at that. This is the first novel in years that’s made me laugh out loud, which is rare. When Anna meets a young man in the crowd of an anarchist rally, she describes him as,

“tall and fair-haired and he had one of those asymmetrical cuts with an underside shaved. Paired with the jumpsuit and his fresh, Aryan face, the boy looked like a queer Nazi plane mechanic. He introduced himself in three unintelligible syllables. It was probably Anthony but I began to think of him as Antifa.”

The ebullience that coursed through my veins reading Freiman’s rollicking sentences made me think that maybe the future is in fact, not, canceled.

Lately I’ve realized that I’m a woman.

This is overtly obvious, but after a lifetime of trying to assimilate into bro culture, one tends to forget. Magda Cârneci is also a woman. She is a 68 year old Romanian woman, quite different than myself, yet she alludes to this earthly quilt comprising the ‘female experience’. What is female experience, apart from waking up each month cutely surprised to see the sheets soaked through to the mattress?

“I step into the world. Into unctuous material. Into a warm perplexity. It is really my body, it is really the world! A kind of grenade with the pin removed. A burst pomegranate, overripe. Its core pink and juicy, full of round, dark seeds glowing gently.”

At a time when it’s too hot to leave the confines of your newly scaffolded steel/wood/glass high rise apartment building, complete with pool table, communal kitchen, and Home Goods artwork mass produced by peasants, how does the disparity between fem and Gaia come to fruition?

I ask myself often what it means psychologically for all fem-identifying people on earth to watch the environment literally disintegrate to smithereens. Is this a new kind of generational trauma, or a Tik Tok trend? Is it a psy-op designed to make us dependent on Big Pharma? Or is it a deeply human thread of carnage that is plucked and pillaged with each successive generation, splicing the mind and organs like a guillotine?

Cârneci attempts to answer some of these questions, but as the ‘Romanian Lispector’, she has more of a duty to uphold her reputation and cultivate #EasternEuropeanPride. Nonetheless, ‘Fem’ is a smattering of musings, stories, poetry, and love letters to the feminine, reminding us that every human on Earth shares Gaian flesh. This slim volume is a lyrical ode to the utter despair and searing beauty that is the female experience.

Thank you Romania!

xo

Short stories often leave me with a putrid taste in my gums. Their open ended nature, their abstract syntax, their nameless characters all work dutifully to saturate me with contempt. But I couldn’t pass up a story about a late capitalist startup whose mission statement is “reputation laundering, which is to say, we take on clients who for one reason or another fell out of public favor and are looking for brand reinvention.”

Madeline Cash is a cusp Gen Z-Millennial alt-lit indie writer who also cofounded Forever Mag. To say she’s a GB (girlboss) is an understatement. I read her story Water Sports in Heavy Traffic Mag a few months ago and thoroughly enjoyed it (because it definitely makes sense that I enjoy journals of short stories but not books of short stories). However, I was dubious whether or not she could get me to stay for the ‘whole movie’ (which is another fault of mine- technology attention deficit.)

To say the least, Earth Angels was a pleasant sip of ice cold Twisted Tea on a moist CCS (climate-change-summer) day. The stories fully embody the Honor Levy-esque callous honesty and irony verging on barbarity but it works because, as one of the first mass published Dimes Square-adjacent works (aside from Island Time that didn’t have much advertising), it’s both humbly demure while still eliciting intrigue. You are given little context for the contents of this small pamphlet, that could easily be the second rendition of the Great Controversy . But the stories blend into a nostalgic cocktail of Chuck Palahniuk/ Miranda July with newfangled Delicious Tacos/Brad Philips .

Now I’m an Earth Angel and you can be one too for the inflation-reflected price of $16.95.

xo <3

I have a time fetish. 

Any period before 9/11 gets me going, really. I salivate at colorized World War 2 footage. All those pink cheeked marionettes whizzing around at 2x speed call out to me, come join our ranks, come join our ranks. I’m a sucker for anything that is frozen unless you were there to experience it, a slate scrubbed free of the crusted sludge of vlogs, Tweets, or the 24 hour news cycle.

The past is a mirage in the Lacanian sense- ‘it will have been’. Lacan theorized that the repressed does not return from the past, but from the future, what he called ‘anticipated retrospection’. Often, I find myself wondering how else I might be living the current moment, if I should have moved to a different city, gone to a different school, taken a different drug. I was chastised by an ex boyfriend when I expressed longing to one day wake up in the past. Cookie Mueller only exacerbated that desire.

I had never heard of Cookie, but she is what one would call a classic water strider- wherever there was action, she was around, skittering adjacent to the Manson family, Robert Maplethorpe, and the Studio 54 crowd. Her rollicking life shone like a gem encrusted Google Maps navigation icon on the road to insanity; always on the verge of being raped, murdered, or succumbing to existential psychosis, Cookie somehow succeeded in blowing iridescent gas bubbles of beauty into the precarious bowels of pre-Reaganism.

Born in Maryland in 1959, Cookie quickly realized she would shrivel up like a prolapsed ovary if she didn’t dodge her inevitable fate of housewifeism. She befriended John Waters and was featured in many of his early films, most notably Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble, alongside infamous actress Divine. Walking Through Clear Water is an American magnum opus, a cocktail of vignettes that take you from Berlin (where she scaled the Wall drunk in a mini skirt), to the Rockies (where she watched her friend’s house burn down after forgetting to open the damper). Cookie died of AIDS at age 40, but in that time she possessed what every human will only dream of. She was a million people at once, a shapeshifter, always working different jobs-from packing fish on a wharf to stripping- always seeping into different circles of artists, writers, intellects, hippies, extremists, always shedding skin and self to embody as many alternate realities as possible.

We should all strive to be more like Cookie.

In this speculative fiction debut from Allie Rowbottom, an ex-influencer meditates on her early 20's from a post-internet future. Like a contemporary Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde, Rowbottom's protagonist Anna Wrey (sorry, @annawrey) is an auto fictional avatar of Rowbottom during her time at NYU as a 'budding internet figure.' Anna is a micro influencer (less than 100,000 followers) who moves from Houston to LA in pursuit of more followers!

The title references the procedure a now 35-year-old Anna is about to receive in order to reverse all the plastic surgery she got when she was younger. Aesthetica promises to return patients to their natural selves, even lasering sun spots onto the skin for the prime illusion of natural aging. Anna looks back on her early 20’s, and we 'follow' along with her- as she's reposted, tagged, sponsored, injected, drugged and raped all the way to the hellish pit of despair that is social media prominence. 

This sounds and looks like a ghost written autobiography of a high-school-dropout-turned-L.A.-model. The book market right now is nauseatingly oversaturated with post-pandemic, Web 2.0 social media commentary. Naturally, I assumed this one would be just as sinister and hollow as the rest. However, amidst the sludge of Rowbottom's vocal fry-like prose, a golden current of wisdom shone through.

She touches on the contrast between the digital-physical self and the more Anna cultivates her internet presence, the more transparent and nonexistent her real self becomes. Authors Douglas Coupland and Shumon Basar touch on this in their manifesto The Extreme Self- "The fragmented self central to the psychological study of trauma is seemingly analogous to the extreme self: as a result of the digital bits of ourselves we leave behind in the cloud, we end up everywhere and nowhere at once." 

This is the kind of book I never want to read again but am glad I read it. 

xo