By Sue Preneta
Sophie had seen through three men in the past year. First and most importantly she’d seen through Joe, her husband of twenty-six years. But she was tired of thinking about that.
Damian Lillard’s DEEP THREES! Make a Mockery of the 1925 YMCA Gym I Play Basketball In
By Pete Tothero
For the casual player, however, the deep three begs a question: if Mike Breen felt Lillard’s first shot was from “way outside,” well…just how way outside was it? The next time I decide to start chucking shots from wherever I want in my local game, where do I need to shoot from while shouting, “DAME TIME!”
Album Bracketology, Part Three: Descent into Madness
By Matthew Kauffman Smith
The double elimination album tournament continues, though the intern assigned to design the articles has become increasingly upset by the content and is now attempting a kind of interventionist design.
To Sucker
By John Carr Walker
My father took the whole family suckering the spring I was eleven, my sister six. It's the only time I remember all of us working in the vineyards together. Dad was trying to teach us a lesson about work ethic—Dad always said he was teaching work ethic, though I can say now the only thing I learned from him about work was do things his way, or else.
Are Times Tough, or Is it Possible You’re Just Bohemian?
This popular quiz first ran in 2013. Are the questions still valid? Select the answers that fit you best, add up your points, and find out!
After Several Years of Living
Evan P. Schneider chats with Melissa Reeser Poulin about her new poetry collection, Rupture, Light (Finishing Line Press).
They Can’t Touch Us
By Marlena Williams
Beneath its surface, The Entity is a film about sexual violence and the ways in which society silences the women who experience it, while keeping the men who perpetuate it hidden from view.
A Symphony of Voices
By Catherine Johnson
“The stories we tell about our own lives, to others but especially to ourselves, we tell in order to make our lives livable,” writes Maria Popova in her new book, Figuring. At its core this book is precisely that: a beautifully woven collage of stories about how we tell stories. How we construct the narratives of individuals and humanity at large in order to make our relative millisecond of existence worthwhile.
Album Bracketology, Part Two: Let's Call Him Fred Toppel
By Matthew Kauffman Smith
The double elimination album tournament nobody asked for continues with a vague anecdote about cleaning microwaves at ABC News and impenetrable references to virtual tournaments in parallel universes. Well-designed, though.
Album Bracketology 2019 (An Exercise in Design)
By Matthew Kauffman Smith
The double elimination album tournament nobody asked for returns while the editorial staff is away on spring break.
Who was Barbara Loden?
By Kate McCourt
”Wanda must rank as that cinematic rarity, a movie that really does get better—much better—as it goes along,” Roger Greenspun stated in his 1971 Times review of Barbara Loden’s first feature film as director. The film stands today as Loden’s sole produced work of feature-length writing, directing, and lead acting—she died of cancer at the age of forty-eight, nine years after Wanda’s release.
Bourgeois Shares "Devil" Talk on The Steer
On The Steer podcast, Wendy Bourgeois talks with Sunny Bleckinger about marrying criticism and the personal essay.
We Have Seen the Enemy, and It Is Television
By Tevis Eurythmic
Cinema hates television. In The Theory of the Novel, Georg Lukacs posits that there are true novels and fake novels—books labeled “a novel” that are really just narratives created to move mass units of recycled stereotypes and tired tropes. Visual depictions of small screens inside cinematic worlds in the 1970s and 1980s suggest cinema felt the same about television: that the “idiot box” is a fraudulent, socially corrosive form of visual storytelling—a cheap, fake version of cinema.
The Devil Says Maybe at Happy House
Wendy Bourgeois and Matthew Robinson read at Happy House.
Four Poems by Hajara Quinn
By Hajara Quinn
Dismay aside, / to what extent / could we always have seen it coming
From "Tony Wolk: Letters, 1981-2027"
By Tony Wolk
A missive on Wolk’s Sourdough.
Gielgud in Los Angeles
Dan DeWeese and Daniel Quantz at Book Soup November 30th.
Executive First Class
By Jess Nicol
“I must be clear that although I am writing you with the knowledge and care of a Canada Air Communications Specialist, the contents of this note are written strictly from an individual standpoint (from Stuart Tweed the man, rather than Stuart Tweed, long-term Canada Air employee).”
A World Outside Ours
By Keri Thomas
Does what animals feel bear some resemblance to what we feel?
Join Us October 30 at Our Launch Party for The Devil Says Maybe You Like It
We’ll celebrate Wendy Bourgeois’ essay collection at Boys Fort.