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Part 2: The Offer
Steve Lowe and the Mugwump. Photograph by Michael Childers. A story in three parts. Previously: Part 1, The Amanuensis. I met Steve the first time I stayed at the Lautner Motel, in August of 2000. I...
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The Beetle and the Fly
From the original cover of Kafka’s Die Verwandlung, 1915. I woke up one morning recently to discover that I was a seventy-year-old man. Is this different from what happens to Gregor Samsa in The...
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Staff Picks: Catharsis, Consumed, Containers
Photoville, in Brooklyn Bridge Park. Image via Photoville’s Instagram “‘The first thirty days after that performance … it hurt. I just wasn’t right. Whatever that was … catharsis … People don’t...
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The Beetle and the Fly
We’re out until January 5, but we’re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2014 while we’re away. We hope you enjoy—and have a happy New Year! From the original cover of Kafka’s Die Verwandlung,...
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Flying Saucers Over the Art Department!
How the book designers of the fifties and sixties tackled alien invasions. A still from Forbidden Planet, 1956. It’s impossible to know what sort of cover design will make a book fly off the shelves....
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The Grim Game’s Disappearing Act
Harry Houdini in The Grim Game. In 1919, a year after he’d startled America by vanishing a four-thousand-pound elephant named Jenny onstage at the New York Hippodrome, Harry Houdini arrived in...
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A Lost Exchange Between Burroughs and Ginsberg
Photo: Hank O’Neal. In 1992, five years before his death, Allen Ginsberg visited William S. Burroughs’s home in Lawrence, Kansas. Over the course of four days, the two Beats chatted about everything...
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Staff Picks: Scary Stories
Halloween decorations, Black Bull, Wetherby, West Yorkshire. Mtaylor848, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. While every story in Meng Jin’s Self-Portrait with Ghost is eerie—as the collection’s title...
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