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.
In our morning reading: an interview with Jasmin ‘Ionani Hakes, Toni Morrison on Flannery O’Connor, and more.
Flare
by Madeline McFarland
Just after the New Year, I left early in the morning from Brooklyn for my next Botox appointment. It had snowed in the soft, heavy way the night before, and the sun had just risen, casting the street of brownstones in a light blue glow. The scene was still and mostly undisturbed—I traced only a few crunchy footsteps in the snow. The powder dusted the skeletal trees and the Christmas trees discarded on the uneven sidewalk between them.
In our weekend reading: an interview with Melissa Faliveno, thoughts on George Saunders’s new novel, and more.
In our afternoon reading: an interview with Naomi Kanakia, talking comics with Tessa Hulls, and more.
In a 2009 essay on the works of pioneering writer Lord Dunsay, Jo Walton explained his significance to the world of uncanny fiction. “Lord Dunsany wasn’t writing fantasy, because what he was writing was defining the space in which fantasy could later happen,” Walton wrote — and praised his ability “to take poetic images and airy tissues of imagination and weight them down at the corners with perfect details to craft a net to catch dreams in.”
Author Chelsea Sutton’s Krackle’s Last Movie, out now from Split/Lip Press, is one monster of a novella – a post-modern Prometheus, if you will (you don’t have to).
The book itself is a patchwork of found footage, oral history, and the inner thoughts of our reluctant protagonist, Harper. It’s the story of a mentor gone missing, a tragic death onstage, and interviews with “real-life” monsters whose lives glance, sometimes violently, off the human world. As she splices, rewinds, and reconstructs Krackle’s decades of encounters with werewolves, mermaids, invisible dancers, and desert sea monsters, Harper finds herself piecing together truths behind her own life secrets, as well as those that led to both Krackle’s disappearance and the Great Merlan’s last trick.
In our morning reading: new writing by Hari Kunzru and Ken Liu, Margaret Killjoy on Minneapolis, and more.