The Mumpsimus

The new issue of Conjunctions  collects stories, essays, and poems that are, in some way or another, "Earth Elegies". It includes my most recent story, "A Liberation", which I chose to dedicate to the memory of my friend and mentor Katherine Min . She was generally known as Katherine, but to me she was Kathie. Or just K. (Kafka was one of the interests we shared.) She died in March, one day after her 60th birthday. It was the end of a long, hard struggle with cancer. I've wanted to write a tribute to her ever since the day of her death, but could not summon words that felt accurate or adequate. I'd known her since I was in college, when she worked in the office next to my mother, and one day she said to my mother that she was thinking about writing a screenplay but didn't know how, and my mother said, "My son's at NYU studying playwriting and screenwriting. I'll put you in touch." And she did. Though neither of us went on to do...

Littleton Opera House, Littleton, NH c.1900, a location in the story I have a new story — my first (but not last) of this year — now available on the Conjunctions website— "The Last Vanishing Man" . This one's a bit of a departure for me, in that it is a serious story that will not, I'm told, make you want to kill yourself after you read it. In fact, one of my primary goals when writing it was to write something not entirely nihilistic. Various people have, over the years, gently suggested that perhaps I might try writing a ... well ... a nice story now and then. (I actually think I've only written one story that is not nice, "Patrimony" in Black Static last year . And maybe "On the Government of the Living" . Well, maybe "How Far to Englishman's Bay" , too. And— okay, I get it...) So "The Last Vanishing Man" is a story that has an (at least somewhat) uplifting ending, and the good people triumph, or at leas...

Bradford Morrow , editor of Conjunctions  and writer of The Diviner's Tale  and The Uninnocent , in an interview conducted by Edie Meidav at The Millions : I may be overly optimistic or utterly blind, but my view of contemporary American fiction is that it is as rich as ever. Some of the best work is being written in what until recently was considered, at least among the conventional literati, genre fiction. Horror, gothic, mystery, fantasy, fabulism. There are so many stunningly original and serious writers working these fields. I have to think that anybody reading this interview would agree. Just one example, though there are many, would be Elizabeth Hand . She composes sentences of ravishing beauty. She is capable of creating metaphor systems that are so dynamic and provocative. She can turn a fictive moment that seems deeply rooted in the everyday into something that, in fact, touches upon the sublime, the miraculous. Just read her novella Cleopatra Brimstone and tell m...