Eugene Fischer

Tag: Rebekah Frumkin

My Friends Write Things: Pains Real and Imagined

As I’ve spent most of my reading time this year in books, I’ve gotten way behind on the things my brilliant friends have published digitally. So here’s a slice of 2015 writing worth  catching up on, with more to come.

Fiction

  • “Descent” by Carmen Maria Machado – Newly Nebula-nominated author and all-around force of nature Carmen Machado, with a horror story about women haunted by death.
  • “Pockets” by Amal El-Mohtar – A story about the quiet magic of reaching your hand in your pocket and pulling out something you never put in, that’s also an extended metaphor for the act of making a piece of art and sending it out into the world. (Disclosure: I gave the author some advice that informed the scientific testing scenes in this story.)
  • “And You Shall Know Her By The Trail Of Dead” by Brooke Bolander – A pulpy, profane, bloodslicked story of cyborg assassins and data thieves who don’t give a damn about anything but each other. Like Battle Angel Alita and Ghost in the Shell got addled on bourbon, had a stumbling fuck in an alley, and couldn’t look one another in the eye the next day.

Nonfiction

  • “A Girl’s Guide to Sexual Purity” by Carmen Maria Machado – Because she’s as adept with a personal essay as she is with a short story, here’s Carmen again, revealing that she was once an earnest, purity ring-wearing 13-year-old, and how she became the queer, sex-positive feminist she is now.
  • “Kidhood (Ritalin, Concerta, Adderall)” by Rebekah Frumkin – The latest installment in Rebekah’s continuing column for McSweeney’s about psychoactive pharmaceuticals, and the insider’s view of the cognition that makes doctors hand them out.
  • “In Manila, Two Seasons, No Regrets” by Laurel Fantauzzo – A Modern Love article about falling into a relationship while traveling, the kind of relationship that’s everything it can be, but not everything you want it to be.
  • “Reflections on a Dirty Dog” by Lisa Wells – A kaleidoscopic, hypnotic essay of suffering for the sake of experience, or for no reason whatsoever, on cross-country Greyhound bus trips.

Poetry

My Friends Write Things

Fiction

  • “I Can See Right Through You” – Stop whatever you’re doing now, because Kelly Link has a new story out in McSweeeny’s. This one’s about celebrity, old relationships, and ghost stories. But you didn’t need to know that. All you needed to know is that there’s a new story to read by Kelly Link. That’s all anyone ever needs to know.

Nonfiction

  • “The Abyss” – More from Rebekah Frumkin, this time writing for Granta about her experience working as seasonal labor in a haunted house. Also, have you been keeping up with her column in McSweeney’s? You should be! The latest installment, “I Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” is about her stint in a psychiatric ward in 2013.
  • “Double Dare: Point Horror” – A new column from Meghan McCarron and Alice Sola Kim, in which they assign each other reading to review. In this first column they revisit a couple volumes of a classic tweenage horror series.
  • “Checklist” – Genevieve Valentine with a caustic and heartbreaking and infuriating piece about the pressures brought to bear on rape victims.
  • “Going Aboard” – Ben Shattuck took a trip on a recreation of a ship much like the one in Moby-Dick, and wrote about how time has altered the experience.
  • “Tasers, Drones, and Cold Chicken: Inside the Multibillion-Dollar Business of Keeping Me Out of America” – Jose Orduna visits a border security expo and writes about it with powerful, deserved rage.

Poetry

Recent Writing by Friends of Mine

Nonfiction

Fiction

  • “A Dismal Paradise” – Ashley Davidson with a story in Five Chapters that really stayed with me. It’s a gorgeous, subtle look at the complicated boundaries of humanity and infirmity. This is a favorite subject of mine, and Ashley has explored it with memorable grace.
  • “We Are The Cloud” – Sam Miller in Lightspeed Magazine, with a science fiction story about the exploitation of orphan children that is, by turns, tender and brutal.
  • “The Glass Bottle Trick” – Nalo Hopkinson in Fantasy Magazine with a new take on the Bluebeard story. I overdosed on retold folklore a few years ago and haven’t usually been able to enjoy it since, but perhaps I’ve gotten over it, because I liked this. Bit of a linked variables problem, though; I almost always like Nalo’s work.

Recent Writing by Friends of Mine

My friends are talented and prolific! Look at their things!

NONFICTION:

  • “Luxury Shopping, From The Other Side of the Register” – In December Carmen Machado wrote for the New Yorker about what it’s like to be working retail during the busiest shopping days of the year.
  • “Bummed Out and Ugly” – Alice Sola Kim with a beautiful and personal remembrance of Philip K. Dick.
  • “Crossroads and Coins: A Review of Naomi Mitchison’s Travel Light” – Amal El-Mohtar writing for NPR, another quite personal piece. Having recently read the book myself, I can confirm that it is as delightful as Amal claims.
  • “Scattered Leaves” – Ben Mauk writing for the New Yorker about the current practice of dismembering ancient manuscripts and selling individual pieces of them on eBay, as well as the long history of “book breaking.”
  • “To Flip a Flop” – Also in the New Yorker, Elizabeth Weiss writes about the economics of the broadway show, using the example of the largely unsuccessful Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark.

FICTION:

  • “The Glitch” – Rebekah Frumkin shows off her talent for claustrophobic interiority and familiarity with 64-bit Zelda games in this story at Granta.
  • “The Engineers” (pdf link) – Rebecca Rukeyser with a story in the Massachusetts Review of expatriate courtship in South Korea.