Tragic Strip

By Tom Motley

MAY 2019 | Fiction

Tom Motley is a cartoonist, illustrator, and educator. His publications include Tragic Strip (a monthly strip in the Brooklyn Rail), The Golden Ass, The One Marvelous Thing, and contributions to the indie anthology Cartozia Tales. He teaches cartooning at the School of Visual Arts and illustration at Pratt.

Estefania Velez Rodriguez: Time’s Passage is probably an Illusion

By Robert R. Shane

SEPT 2021 | ArtSeen

We feel disorientation and ecstasy as we enter Estefania Velez Rodriguez’s large-scale landscapes in Time’s Passage is probably an Illusion. Illuminated by fluorescent oil and spray paint, the pattern-rich paintings strip away the surface of the natural world to reveal the inner life of nature and of the artist.

Lincoln Michel’s The Body Scout

By Rone Shavers

OCT 2021 | Books

Let’s start by stating the obvious: Lincoln Michel is an enormously talented writer, and one of the things he does exceptionally well is blend genres. I say that because The Body Scout is a mashup of cyberpunk, noir detective novel, and literary fiction centered on the premise of what it means to be human, and well worth the advance buzz it has already received.

Playing the Beautiful Game: David Hollander’s Anthropica

By Dina Peone

JUNE 2021 | Books

A grubby mathematician whose wife copulates with everyone but him, Stuart Dregs, has discovered an impossible truth: the human race depletes the Earth’s resources every 30 days, and therefore life—everything in the knowable cosmos—must persist only because we want it to. Dregs’s theory of creation-as-desire powers the premise of Anthropica, a new novel by David Hollander that amplifies the imminent dangers of global warming while destabilizing the familiar patterns of both modern life and mainstream fiction, such as the notion that characters (humans) are driven by a sense of purpose toward a climax (a life-defining event such as marriage).