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“Waves”: An Excerpt From Josh Denslow’s “Magic Can’t Save Us”

Magic Can't Save Us

We’re pleased to present an excerpt from Josh Denslow’s new short story collection Magic Can’t Save Us, available now from University of New Orleans Press. Acclaimed author Sequoia Nagamatsu had this to say about the book: “With the fabulist hand of Aimee Bender and Karen Russell and the humor and irreverence of Steve Almond, Denslow masterfully juggles crumbling relationships and beings of myth in a whirlwind of awkward silences, deceit, and failure to love.” Read on for a glimpse of what’s inside this new collection.

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Steve Cuzor’s “The Red Badge of Courage” Adaptation Has a Trailer

"The Red Badge of Courage"

Steve Cuzor is no stranger to telling stories about men at war. His bibliography includes the Black Cotton Star series of graphic novels, which tell a story that spans centuries, including sequences in both the Revolutionary War and World War II. Now, he’s returned with his adaptation of Stephen Crane’s novel The Red Badge of Courage, due out this month from Abrams ComicArts.

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Six Ridiculous Questions: Jeremy T. Wilson

Jeremy T. Wilson

The guiding principle of Six Ridiculous Questions is that life is filled with ridiculousness. And questions. That only by giving in to these truths may we hope to slip the surly bonds of reality and attain the higher consciousness we all crave. (Eh, not really, but it sounded good there for a minute.) It’s just. Who knows? The ridiculousness and question bits, I guess. Why six? Assonance, baby, assonance.

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The Fiction of Art: On Emmalea Russo’s “Vivienne”

"Vivienne"

What does a real-life backstory matter in a fictional context? In an interview published by The Creative Independent earlier this year, Emmalea Russo discussed her novel Vivienne with Brittany Menjivar. Menjivar’s first question was about how Vivienne’s (fictional) title character was, in the novel’s universe, married to the real-world artist Hans Bellmer. Russo also noted the influence of the late writer Unica Zurn on the novel.

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Social Media Gets (Literally) Wild in This Preview of “That Sexy Bear!”

"That Sexy Bear!" cover

Comics duo Owlin have drawn critical acclaim for their previous work, including the graphic novel How Do You Smoke a Weed? They’ve returned with a new project with publisher Iron Circus Comics, and this one is an unlikely combination of parkside antics and social media satire. Publisher Spike Trotman described That Sexy Bear! as having “[e]choes of classic mid century cartoons, crossed with 21st century sociopolitical anxiety and TikTok shitposting. It’s a terrible but familiar vision of eking out an existence in an Always Online America.”

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We do, we make, we are

"SKIN" blog tour banner

Performative, collaborative, immersive: SKIN hits all those marks, marks I didn’t know were there when I first wrote it, when I first began to understand what it might be like to work within a group of passionate people wanting more than anything—or almost anything, their creative and emotional mileage does vary—to make what they see in their minds and feel in their bodies become real: real enough to engage, to terrify, to galvanize an audience, people who came to see something they had never seen before.

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