Statement of Record
Imagining the next four years—let alone two hundred—often seems daunting and bleak; not so for novelist Jordan A. Rothacker, whose most recent work visualizes a far different distant future.
Jordan Rothacker is a writer based in Athens, Georgia, where he received his master’s degree in religion and PhD in comparative literature at...
I want this book to encourage people to write the same book about Boston, LA, or Berkeley. Chicago or Atlanta. And make people read, reread, and more deeply understand works of African American literature.
Allow me to begin with a disclaimer. Michael J. Wilson is a label-mate of mine from Stalking Horse Press, which published my short story collection, Gristle: Weird tales. While Wilson and I have never met in person, we are friends on social media and...
This is the second time I’ve interviewed James Reich, and it is good to catch up with him after the publication of his newest novel, The Moth for the Star, released in late 2023 from 7.13 Books. This haunting and masterful novel takes the reader right into the heart of “dark Modernism,” a territory...
As she attempts to trace the increasingly portentous-seeming name in her grandfather’s WWI journal chronicling his time digging trenches in France, the narrator of Forgotten Night is haunted by the absence of Jewish life in the villages she travels through, by the desolation of the scattered traces remaining.
Research suggests that reading literature improves theory of mind because it provides a complex look into the lives of people whose circumstances, experiences, and histories are different from our own. Does an improved theory of mind result in selfless behavior? No. If it did, we wouldn’t have literary writers, professors, and readers who are assholes, but we do.
I first became acquainted with the work of Erika T. Wurth when Astrophile Press sent me an advanced edition of Buckskin Cocaine for review in 2017. I instantly loved the book and was excited to write about it. I was captivated by the interconnectivity of the “Hollywood Indian...
A digressive approach gave me the freedom to shape a narrative ostensibly about my “routine surgery” into a detailed portrait of my world and my state of mind during those two particular weeks of my life.
Thomas Dolby once said that he writes songs like a frustrated novelist. I like to say that I write books like a frustrated musician. I first started out writing lyrics to songs I was making in high school. Then I moved to writing poems before migrating towards stories and, eventually, novels. No surprise, my early poems were mostly about music and musicians as well. So, I think it’s always...
Tosh Berman can never be separated from his pedigree—that his father Wallace was an artist of such originality and aesthetic coolness he was on the album cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band—but his father passed in 1976, and Tosh is here now and doing great work. Tosh Berman manages his father’s artistic estate...
I always want to feel some kind of intellectual searching and an emotional charge in a poem. My experience with poetry is a lot like my experience with movies. I just want to sit in the dark and think and feel. But I can admire and be made better by poems I don’t connect with or understand, too. If someone writes something and calls it, with any sincerity, a poem...
The core project of my Archeology, rather, is expressed in the title: a digging down into an older culture, one closer to life’s raw materials, in order to put together my own best life.
Statement of Record