alec michod

Ben Marcus is one of the most playful, irreverent and linguistically exciting novelists at work today. I inhaled Notable American Women when it came out, was bummed when he swooped in and ran Columbia’s MFA program a year after I graduated, and have combed through his new album, The Flame Alphabet, as if it were one [...]

Antonya Nelson is one of my favorite short story writers. One of my favorite writers, period. She has always managed to get the peculiar into the ordinary in the most unexpected ways. And then there’s her phrasing, in both her exposition and her dialogue. Take the opening of her most recent story, “Chapter Two,” from [...]

I don’t think I can do this anymore.
There’s someone new at the door.
When he wrote you did you cut-and-paste?
I used to think it was good to be chaste.
During off-hours trains stop here.
I won the race every year but last year.
There’s a new sheriff in town and it ain’t me.
In my dream I loved you inconclusively.
Soon [...]

We all get cancer and die
and want to change
our lives
and talk about de Kooning
and talk
but not think or think
but not talk.

Barney Rosset has passed away at the age of 90. One could argue that Rosset is one of the most influential–if not the most influential–person in the arts this past century. His influence is strong today, though little celebrated, although recently he’s received some belated exposure. The Daily Be called him “The Most Dangerous Man in [...]

When I was a younger writer caught up in the fever dream of what would be my first abandoned novel, I wrote in a state of panic and dread to David Foster Wallace, then stationed at Illinois State University, in Normal, Illinois. Call this invasion an act of literary stalking, but this was before Infinite [...]

I wrote an essay about long, lunatic novels. Read it at The Rumpus.
If the great English novelist and linguist Anthony Burgess was onto something when he wrote, in A Mouthful of Air, that literature arose as an expression of “loneliness and exile—a cry in the dark, whistling in the dark”—then what are we to do with these [...]

I interview psychedelic painter Fred Tomaselli in the January issue of The Believer.
THE PROCESS
IN WHICH AN ARTIST DISCUSSES MAKING A PARTICULAR WORK
FRED TOMASELLI, NIGHT MUSIC FOR RAPTORS

The world according to Fred Tomaselli is a dark, druggy, visually lurid place: a swirling dazzle of eye-popping data. Influenced equally by SoCal surfer culture and New York City trash-punk, [...]

Chris Holmes is a mad scientist of bustling beats, a necessary rock star in an age of diluted dilettantes, and one of the most brilliant and down-to-earth people I have ever met.
I met Chris at the University of Chicago, back when he was fronting a psychedelic grunge Chicago band called Sabalon Glitz, but I didn’t [...]

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was at my apartment in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. For some reason, I turned on the TV before leaving for work: I don’t know why, it wasn’t something I did regularly at the time. Images of North Tower burning were already on the air. After watching, dumbfounded, I [...]