Tag: My Friends Write Things

New Writing: Ted Chiang, Ben Mauk, Carmen Machado

New things for you to read!

“Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order SVU” by Carmen Machado

The best new thing on the internet today is this novella by Carmen Machado. I saw a draft of this story in workshop when she wrote it, and have been waiting impatiently ever since for the day when I could share my enthusiasm for it with everyone else. It’s a hypnotic and haunting look at the cultural reception of sexual violence, and structured to make reading it feel like you are on a secret Netflix binge. It’s brilliant. No familiarity with the show is required.

Read “Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order SVU” at the American Reader.

“Advertising at the End of the World” by Keffy Kehrli

Keffy’s last publication was in the print magazine Sybil’s Garage, so I couldn’t link to it.  But this one is online at Apex Magazine.  This was another of Keffy’s Clarion stories, and has one of the best first lines that showed up that summer.  It is also, as so many of his stories are, suffused with dark, understated humor.  Go read “Advertising at the End of the World.”

“Tentacle Mind Report” by Stefani Nellen

Steffi wrote the first draft of this story at Clarion last summer, and after a couple of pages I put my pen down and forgot I was supposed to be critiquing because I was so engrossed by it.  Steffi has a gift for marrying the mundane to the unsettling, and while this story of parasitic friendship and mental collapse in recently reunified Germany is among the most naturalistic she wrote last summer, fantastic imagery intrudes as a pseudo-authorial voice in a way that is deeply creepy and utterly brilliant.  I have been eagerly awaiting getting to see this story again, and now Conjunctions has had the wisdom to publish it.  Go read Stefani Nellen’s “Tentacle Mind Report.”

Sarah Miller in Everyday Weirdness

My Clarionmate Sarah Miller has had a lovely, elegant flash piece published at Everyday Weirdness.  Take a few moments and make your day a little stranger by experiencing “The Music at Bash Bish Falls.

Paul M. Berger in INTERZONE

I urge you to find a way to get your hands on the current issue of Interzone, which contains the story “Home Again,” by Paul M. Berger.  Paul was my Clarion classmate and roomie, and I got to read the first draft of this story at the workshop.  I don’t actually know of anyplace in San Antonio that sells Interzone, but I’m going to have to track down a copy, because this story was a creepy little gem even at its earliest, and I must have it in a form that I can thrust in the faces of others.