Features

Parable of America

By Kimberly Jackson It’s 2024, gated communities are under siege, armed guards patrol the high-walled gates keeping out the poor, foreign, sick, and starving. The wealth inequality has widened along with climate-fueled fires, water is scarce, the police are privatized and rarely come unless you are wealthy, and social fragmentation is the norm. Entire communities are ablaze while the country scrolls past the footage. And on the political campaign trail is a candidate who promises Read more

By logan.farley, ago

How to Avoid Supporting Problematic Authors

By Ember Richardson The news cycle is perpetually inundated with bad news wherever you look. Whether it’s daily CNN broadcasts, a local news station, or even your social media feeds, there always seems to be something terrible. As a reader, I turn to books to escape into other worlds, where heroes narrowly avoid death by dragon-fire and are forced to fight baddies around the clock, because at least it’s not my current reality. So it’s Read more

By logan.farley, ago

Where the Better Things Are

By Ava Kevitt TW: death, mention of violence They had appeared at the edges of her vision when she was still just a baby, crawling on the floor.   Buzzing around her head like flies, her childmind would simply call them ugly monsters. She didn’t know that most people weren’t able to see them. Not until one tried to touch her.   That one had been particularly ugly, with skin waxy like paper, slowly sliding off his Read more

By logan.farley, ago

Art-Crimes: Übermensch

By Chase Docter TW: Murder, dismemberment, general cruelty. World religion has, at least in the most developed regions, shrunk significantly more than what was projected; not replaced by carefree agnostics and self-determined atheists, but instead a population of depressed and spiteful nihilists, all convinced that their lives mean nothing to anyone, yet all equally scared to cut the cord for good. Nietzsche said that, after religion faded and declined, the world would be left full Read more

By logan.farley, ago

Grave

By M. K. Werner My best friend was dead. That was what they had tried to tell me, though I refused to believe it. It was something inconceivable; she couldn’t be gone. I told them so, and eventually they stopped trying to convince me, leaving me in silence to grieve. But I didn’t want to grieve. I couldn’t grieve, because Anastasia wasn’t dead, so there wasn’t anyone to grieve for.  They had her funeral today, Read more

By logan.farley, ago