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3 weeks ago | 
thebaffler.com | Adrian Van Young |Abe Beame
The cake has become a problem. In the back of the car the three women try to solve it like an equation. Rita sits in the middle, squished between Hilda and Seraphina, the golden cake board flat against her thighs. Rita, nearly six feet tall, has made a commitment to use her height to her advantage. No more shrinking away. But in the car she must slump to avoid thumping her head. The cake is a giant vanilla sheet cake.
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Jan 6, 2025 | 
thebaffler.com | Adam J. Gellings |Adrian Van Young
My one good eye continues to have the last laugh; it has no other company; once considered a perceived threat: it has since been removed off the X but from time to time still levels with the clumsy cataracts of the widowed key-maker: my one good eye follows the crow’s feet just below the arch of brow-line where it has learned to sit with its nose to the skin of the earth & really listen; it found a penchant for archeological fragments; fishbones, polished groin, the strident cry of the cock;...
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Oct 28, 2024 | 
thebaffler.com | Matthew Goodman |Hai-Dang Phan |Adrian Van Young
Choose your precipice. The grist that makes modern life will run out at some point—when will we tap the last barrel of crude, blow through the remaining stocks of helium, deplete those rare metals only getting rarer? More pressing than bismuth and boron as I write this in September is who will win the election; even more pressing than that is a ceasefire in Gaza, though one worries that the war will only widen.
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Oct 28, 2024 | 
thebaffler.com | Anselm Berrigan |Kyra Simone |Rafia Zakaria |Adrian Van Young
I would just like to point out, but I always endup pointing in.
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Oct 28, 2024 | 
thebaffler.com | Cynthia Zarin |Jude Doyle |Rivkah Brown |Adrian Van Young
Sky streaked with azure and bloodred. That memory swift-hooved, tramples itself, the cart wheel rutting in the ditchwould turn backward. That sound in bridal raiment to meet Achilles. A mouse-tail mattered less to me Less than that, that took my love, my thrush my heart forfeit. And you, it was youNo god cares where I lay my headI don’t care where I make my bedMy bond unmade where my sweet deer lies.
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Oct 25, 2024 | 
thebaffler.com | Adrian Van Young
Go on, find it on your phone. “The Lady in Red” by Chris De Burgh from his seminal 1986 album Into the Light. Now standing at the kitchen island, hover your finger above the play icon. But don’t press it yet, make yourself really earn it. See, you have to be hungry to really eat well. Crap.
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Sep 3, 2024 | 
thebaffler.com | Pooja Bhatia |Adrian Van Young
It was almost spring this year when I met V., but he was still recovering from his first winter blizzard.
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Feb 14, 2024 | 
southwestreview.com | Adrian Van Young |Robert Rea
By Adrian Van Young In the ever-expanding world of the weird tale, of which Bernardo Esquinca, author of The Secret Life of Insects (Esquinca’s second collection in English translation), is a lively practitioner, there is often so much emphasis placed on the idea of story conceit, the attention-getting narrative set piece that gives so many tales of the supernatural and the grotesque their unique sense of purpose—for instance, the transient shape-shifting entity at the center of Nathan...
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Oct 31, 2023 | 
lithub.com | Adrian Van Young
The monster must be ten feet tall. Its musculature heaves and gleams, as though flayed. Its unblinking eyes stand out spider-egg white. Its head is roughly pumpkin-shaped because that’s where the monster gets its name, though the head really looks like some sort of batard, channels of mold running through it like veins. It has strange armature on its shoulders and back that at one point in time might’ve fluttered with wings.
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Oct 27, 2023 | 
thebaffler.com | Adrian Van Young
Wülf woke to a shoe pulverizing his face, another dive-bombing the top of his head, and still other shoes in his neck and his chest and his groin and his legs—a swarm of shoes attached to feet attached to the Crusties, who loomed above Wülf, their unfinished mugs peering down in the firelight of Wülf’s all-time spacious, impregnable squat, the best one Wülf had ever had, which he knew, even now, he would not give up easy.
