
Writer’s block? Gaaah, have a punt on the page. Take off without a map, see what you find. Here are some tips for when my mind’s a real mess and I reckon I’ll suck it and see.

Writer’s block? Gaaah, have a punt on the page. Take off without a map, see what you find. Here are some tips for when my mind’s a real mess and I reckon I’ll suck it and see.

The last decade has seen an increase in works from Katherine Dunn’s archive seeing print, from her ruminations on profanity to a posthumous story collection. Dunn’s bibliography covers a lot of thematic territory, and while Geek Love is her best-known work, it’s far from her only book worth discussing. Also notable about Geek Love: among the accolades it’s received is a nomination for the Bram Stoker Award.

Some horror stories play on primal fears and anxieties; others work by creating monsters so unsettling the reader will have no choice but to flinch. David Simmons’s stories often pursue a third path: creating a profound sense of a world where nearly everything has gone wrong, like a trap door carved in morality that you can’t avoid.

Today, we’re pleased to present an excerpt from Loba Loca, a new graphic novel from Run and Guillaume Singelin. Here’s how publishers Oni Press and Magnetic Press describe the book:

In a culinary landscape often crowded with over-complicated techniques and hard-to-come-by ingredients, Jacob Kenedy’s Pasta Tricolore arrives like a breath of fresh, Mediterranean air. It isn’t merely a cookbook; it’s a joyous, technicolor love letter to beloved Italian cuisine.

Here we are, halfway through the month of August. We also have some books to recommend, as you probably guessed. Some are new; some are reissues. One is a particularly intriguing tribute to an iconic writer; another is a biography of an athlete whose career in sport remains deeply relevant. Read on for some late summer suggestions.

In our morning reading: an interview with Scott McClanahan, where books and pizza converge, and more.
I’ve been reading Scott McClanahan’s work for a long time — long enough to know that Fights!, his new novel, is not his first book with an exclamation mark in the title. (That would be Stories V!.) But there’s also something about Fights! that made reading it substantially different from the experience of reading McClanahan’s other work. And maybe that’s why I’m writing this, which is less of a review and more a case of me figuring things out using […]