Fiction
from Pure Cosmos Club
By Matthew BinderIn Pure Cosmos Club, artist-on-the-margins Paul and his dog Blanche navigate the absurdities of contemporary art and life. Binder's novel is propelled by a dizzying spirit that allows us to observe society's collapse with something akin to sad glee—not unlike the spirit of Aldous Huxley's Antic Hay or Weimar cabaret. Forever Magazine calls it "like Houellebecq but good-natured," which seems about right.
from Underjungle
By James SturzDiscarding anthropocentrism, James Sturz has written an epic from under the sea. Reading Underjungle, Sturz's forthcoming novel which begins with this excerpt, invites suspension at varying depths—at different equilibria of deep water buoying you up and overhead water keeping you submerged. At the most reductive level, Underjungle is a story of an intelligent species known as the yc who encounter a human body. But the discovery of this land creature provides the cephalopodian narrator with the armature for Homeric simile on love and war, the perspective to wax metaphysical, and the possible resolution of the yc species' fracture into seven distinct tribes. Sturz's greatest feat in Underjungle is to make you wonder if he composed the entire thing on a waterproof laptop from the reef floor, such is his ability to light the world aqua.
