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Reverse-Gentrification of the Literary World

Akashic Books

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News & Features

“Lazy Gangsters” by Jen Kitses

Officer Leon James slipped out the back door of the Quayside Oil Company, where he worked part-time as a security guard on the overnight shift. In his hand was a paper bag containing the cold meatball sub that he brought from home but had forgotten to eat. Instead, he’d spent his break dozing in an office chair, his chin nodding toward his chest . . .

Don Waters: On Sunland and the US/Mexico Border

Several years ago I lived in Las Cruces, New Mexico, forty miles from Ciudad Juárez, which at the time was the most dangerous city on the planet. I was in the middle of writing my novel, Sunland, and took long drives whenever I needed to think . . .

“Off the Record” by Ray Van Horn, Jr.

She came up to me in the parking lot behind the Slung Rig after the show. The lot reeked of piss, puke, and exiled pizza scraps. Even the rats were too finicky to troll around this Hamden hole, where headbangers and punkers partied or balled inside their cars whenever there was a gig. Those who could get it on around this stench had a better constitution than me—that, or some sort of mutant fetish, but hell, that’s mutants for you . . .