Featuring: me. Go forth and read issue #30. Specifically this: Esteban Canal’s Immortal Game as Applied to God. By me. Of course. Go read my story-it’s not really a story-read, motherfucker!

David Foster Wallace, dead: He talked about how difficult it was to be a novelist in a world seething with advertisements and entertainment and knee-jerk knowingness and facile irony. He wrote about the maddening impossibility of scrutinizing yourself without also scrutinizing yourself scrutinizing yourself and so on, ad infinitum, a vertiginous spiral of narcissism — [...]

I made a point of flexing my vocabulary while writing a sociology paper last night. The only word I refrained from using (although feel would have been appropriate) was ennui. The reason being that I think I’ve only ever seen it used in reference to hipsters or book reviews. I will be adding it to [...]

You Still Can’t Write About Muhammad: This saga upsets me as a Muslim — and as a writer who believes thatfiction can bring Islamic history to life in a uniquely captivating andhumanizing way. “I’m devastated,” Ms. Jones told me after the book got spiked,adding, “I wanted to honor Aisha and all the wives of Muhammad [...]

“You there! Perform 69 on new books to determine long term compatibility! I shall watch!” Man, I see you in bookstores every time I go in there. There you are, flipping through the books on those card tables, asking the clerks about what is good, trying to figure out what books will get you heavy [...]

Circle Meets Square knows Zen, yo: i’m so fuckin’ gonethat i am not fuckin’ hereyet, i’m fuckin’ here.

I’m not sure what to make of tor.com, really. I have a borderline fanaticism for SciFi movies and television. I never missed an episode of Sliders, and I have seen V a couple of times, but for some reason I just cannot sit down and read the stuff. I don’t know why. I read John [...]

How Come No One Celebrates My Alcoholism Like John Cheever’s? You know, seminal American author John Cheever and I have a lot in common. He needed to drink a fifth of scotch before he had the courage to utter a word to another human being, and so do I. Much like Cheever, I’m completely blotto [...]

Walter Mosley’s Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned was basically amazing. I found myself completely sucked into the stories. That does not happen very often. I have forbidden myself from doing book reviews here, so that’s about it. Compelling is a good word. I would use it here, in a review. So are concise, zen and gritty. [...]

This is bloody ridiculous. While Mein Kampf is tasteless and insipid, I despair in thinking that it ‘screwed the world up’ (nobody in the right mind would take it seriously nowadays anyway and it does, sadly, provide much to historians). The fact that perfectly reasonable philosophy books are on either of these lists, I find [...]