CHAPTER SIX.

— Bitchuation (@Bitchuation) April 29, 2013

well, if she confesses and he kills her, great. the question is will she kill him first? BEAT

— Bitchuation (@Bitchuation) April 29, 2013

no, but i can–i can–yes, we can–BEAT (off, left) sherrill, can you–get gary maloney

— Bitchuation (@Bitchuation) April 29, 2013

END OF CHAPTER SIX.

— Bitchuation (@Bitchuation) April 29, 2013

So this is happening.

It's once more into the breach with David Sedaris. “I don’t think David ever posed himself as a journalist,” said Torey Malatia, who heads Chicago Public Media, which produces “This American Life.” “He’s a storyteller, a humorist. The giveaway is when he’s wildly exaggerating. It’s art. It’s fiction.”

See? Quit your complaining. You're just supposed to know when he's lying and when he isn't. "It’s acknowledged that he’s making things up," says a visiting journalism professor in Las Vegas! See? It's just acknowledged. If you don't get "the giveaway," it's because you're not a coastal elite with a finely tuned ear for lies and not lies. Also [...]

This Nathan Englander story in the New Yorker is pretty great! And in my favorite genre of story, which is "people in a house talking."

You may think I'm a dick or arrogant or delusional or whatever, and frankly it doesn't matter to me. I've written four books. Published in thirty-nine languages. I sold millions and millions and millions of copies. Do I want to be more famous? I could give a shit. Do I want to publish in more languages? There are a few left. What matters to me is a hundred years from now when people look back at our time, what writers are they gonna say, "Holy fuck!" I think I am and will be one of those people….

You keep saying "fiction" and "nonfiction"! Those words don't mean anything [...]

As to those, who in presence of their betters are too lowly in speech so that they bring not their voice whole to the lips, it happened to me and without full utterance I began:1

Yes, it is terrible, and sudden2. He thrown everything off balance.3 And then he did go off balance on the ice, taking a step back from the eyes which had penetrated him and emptied his face.4 What was that dim distant music, those vestiges of color in the air?5 The penalty of light forever.6 Then he would be able to think about it and sort things out.7 [...]

The last man I punched was the owner of a vegan grocery store. In general, I don't take issue with the vegans, but I'd recently discovered this particular soy-milquetoast had been having it tantric with Claudette who, at that point, I had still planned to make my common-law wife. I caught up with the vegan in the produce aisle and clipped him in the ear. He told me that no amount of fisticuffs would make Claudette love me again, and then he had me arrested.

They say violence isn't the answer, that it won't make you feel better. If that's the case, why did the afterglow of that [...]

The Unfettered Souls operated out of a repurposed movie theatre in Midtown, where the streets had already been cleared of last night's Chinese garbage rain, likely with the same crisp efficiency Mayor Kelly used to purge the pan-handlers years back. The Midtown economy had come to depend almost entirely on the tourists, which meant cleaner streets, brighter lights, and the installation of the death-defying quadruple-loop Rudy over Times Square. Normally, I avoided Midtown as if there was some plague unique to Eurotrash that I'd catch by rubbing up against the tourists. But my lovesick client Paul Fennell, a mewling man-babe recently detached from The Unfettered Souls' bosom of [...]

Skating in Central Park with Pippa Middleton, Iranian Space Monkey & Bibi Netanyahu. Pippa makes a play-hat of Monkey as Bibi pirouettes.

— Dana Vachon (@danavachon) February 5, 2013

Dana Vachon is one of our favorite writers, but also publishes rarely. So when he drops a short story on Twitter late at night, it's our duty to carefully collect his leavings.

Poor David Sedaris! The recent "truth in journalism" dust-ups—John D'Agata's bizarre book written with a former fact-checker, and the "This American Life" episode-long retraction of Mike Daisey's "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs"—has given everyone a chance to call Sedaris a liar. But it's okay that he is! Sometimes. Wait, is it? Not really. Let's see what everyone thinks about David Sedaris.

"Novelists trafficking in the present would do well to abandon their lingering prejudices against historical fiction as something ready-made and second-rate," claims Thomas Mallon in today's New Yorker, making the case for the highs and lows of "alternative-history fiction," which is my least favorite genre of all time. I hate it so much! (And that's coming from someone who'll read books with like, wizards and garbage.) It most often contains all the boringness of actual history with the lazy sort of ingenuity of a writer with a desperate trick. Do writers, Mallon suggests (and he is more appreciative) turn sometimes to the genre because of fiction's current lack [...]

Picture, if you will, the opening scenes of next year's blockbuster, The Quagmire—a dramatic account of America's descent into the war in Vietnam.

The film opens on young Lt. Lyndon Johnson of the U.S. army. He is stationed in Tokyo in the 1950's. As the opening credits roll, he is sulking away from the base’s fancy officers' club, his application for membership having been rejected. He realizes that try as he might, with his poor Texas upbringing, he will never be one of them. Stung, he ventures out into the field, across the Asian continent, turning over those stones that the well-to-do ne'er-do-wells back at the club couldn't be [...]

This is my book.

This is the book I am writing.

This is a book about me, Peter.

I imagined my insides to be as roughly calloused as a day laborer's thumbs. In my line of work, you develop a certain tolerance for the unexpected gut-punch.  Even a blow delivered by a master of casual brutality like Bo Harkins couldn't slow me down for long. It was more the whole getting tossed in the trash thing that I was sore about. That, and, even after nosing around the Unfettered Souls Wellness Center, still not having a clue how to find my client Paul Fennel's indentured soul mate. I'd returned to Ahmet's bodega to figure out my next move. It was to call Dot, my [...]

I hadn't gone even a block from my office, on my way to poke around a Midtown cult in search of a love connection for my literal godsend of a client, when I made the tail. It was a pair of Cro-Magnon neophytes with the ready-to-pop glamour muscles found on any city goon squad, but the rigid spines and precise, angular haircuts that told me besides rank amateurs they were also likely Privates or Sergeants. I couldn't think of a reason that Uncle Sam would want to pick on me and I wasn't all that curious, so I scooted around the orange vests piling up decapitated Chinese dolls [...]

from Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel

I'm staring across the kitchen table at the cartoonist Alison Bechdel, filled with a vague sense of dread. I am trying not to dwell on the regrettable fact that I arrived almost 15 minutes late for our interview, which perhaps has not set the right tone. While I do not want to gush, or seem nervous, or stupid, it seems that I have just offered to make her tea, as though that were a normal way to respond to a host who has just offered to do the same. It is late afternoon, and it has been raining all damn day. [...]

14. Sex Packets 13. Glint 12. DMZ 11. Vitameatavegamin 10. Comanapracil 9. Gleemonex

It's not every day that Joy Williams, who is possibly America's greatest living writer, publishes something new, so make sure that you save yourself some special time to read this new story that Granta has published online. If you're looking for more short stories to read, why not start with Taking Care or Honored Guest?

NEW YORK CITY, 1979. If Maria, as she entered her second year at Juilliard, rarely had the sense that her move to New York was a dream from which at any moment she might be shaken awake, she continued to have doubts. Linda, for one, seemed so much happier than she was, and the same could be said of many of the other students, who while clearly devoted to their practice regimens, managed to find time for friendship and dating in a way that still felt largely beyond her. As often as she craved having more friends or—a much keener desire—a boyfriend, the singer in her would belittle such [...]

By way of the intellectual jungle that is HuffPo comes news from the archives of Analecta, UT Austin's literary journal. It's director Wes Anderson's 1989 short story from his undergrad years! It has some anomie and some irony!

1.

Spend part of every day at the beach. I sent Jeff's phone a picture of the line for cotton candy on the Santa Monica pier, all tourists from the size of them. He texted back: why don't you photograph people who aren't white? That Pacific blue-I used to run to the end of the pier and taste it. Jeff would have known what made the Atlantic greener.

My hotel was in Century City, with a mall attached. I could get from my room to Saks Fifth Avenue without my shoulders getting sun. The saleswoman said I looked lovely in a [...]