It’s a book that����praised, stating “the novel’s dream logic is as intoxicating as the secluded setting. Readers will eagerly turn the pages of this beguiling literary thriller.” And none other than Mircea Cǎrtǎrescu claimed��Of Beasts and Fowls��is “the most haunting [novel] I have read in years.”

To celebrate this release (the first of two Adón books we’re doing), we’re offering a for the rest of the month. (No checkout code required, U.S. purchases only.)

And to entice you further into this witchy, captivating novel, below you’ll find an excerpt from when Coro arrives at Bethany and has her first interaction with it’s inhabitants.

Also: Sign up for the for more insights into how this book came to be, how it’s being reviewed, and other news from Open Letter. (And an easily accessible way to listen to this conversation with Pilar.)

She’d put a cotton jacket on over her T-shirt, foregoing the summer raincoat she kept in the backseat. If she had to sleep in the car, she would use it as a blanket.

Once she had a handle on the scene—the black fence and the vegetation that grew up around it, the stone walls bordering the lane—she zipped up her jacket and switched on the overhead light. From her purse, she took out a handkerchief embroidered with the letter C and her sketchbook. Maybe there was a security camera on the fence, pointing down at her. Her fixed image at the center of a monitor. Wide-eyed. She was going to write that she needed help on a piece of paper and put it on the windshield, in case somebody, somewhere, could read it. And she was going to draw using the dashboard for support. It was the only thing that would calm her right then, while she got used to the idea that this thing was happening to her. She had actually gotten lost. Her fingers were cold, but she opened the sketchbook and leaned on the dashboard. That’s when she saw that someone was approaching the gate with a flashlight.

“What are you doing here?” The stranger addressed her with the formal you.

She found it odd that a stranger would ask her the exactly same thing she’d been asking herself.

“What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

She rolled down the window.

“I’m lost,” she said.

“What are you looking for? Are you looking for something?”

“I’m running out of gas. I need to know if there’s a gas station somewhere nearby.”

“Are you wanting a house? What do you want? To rent or buy?”

She heard.

“I’m lost. Can you help me?”

“People love coming around here. They’re attracted to the scenery.”

Coro put the handkerchief in her purse and got out of the car.

The woman was opening the gate.

“I just need to turn around and get back to the main highway, but I can’t move with all those planks on the ground. And I’m not sure if I have enough gas. Do you know if nearby . . .”

“It’s not easy to get here. Where do you live?”

The woman drew closer and pointed the flashlight right at her face. She shut her eyes.

“Don’t do that. Please.”

“You’re not from around here.”

She wasn’t going to repeat that she was lost.

“There’s nothing for sale in the area. It’s even worse the closer you get to the mountain. You have to turn around, go back to the flatlands. There are more houses there. More properties.”

“You’re mistaken. I don’t want to buy anything.”

“Then why are you here?”

Coro looked inside the car, still illuminated by the overhead light. Her purse. Her things.

“I’m running out of gas.”

“You’ve said that already.”

For a second, she thought the best thing would be to be clutching the steering wheel again. To put a piece of gum or candy in her mouth. Her breath probably stank.

“Do you have a car? Maybe we could take some gas from your tank and put it in mine. I’ve seen it done, you suck it through a tube.”

The woman shined the flashlight in her face again.

“What’s your name? What’s your surname? I’m not bringing a stranger to my house.”

“I just need a little gas.”

“Have you come alone?”

The woman inspected the inside of the car, the backseat, and asked again what her name was and if she had come there alone.

“I better go. I’ll try to turn around.”

“I think it’s reasonable to want to know the name of the person who has just plunked herself down on my doorstep at this time of night.”

“It wasn’t intentional. I’m telling you.”

She got into the car. The flashlight was right back in her eyes again.

“Come on. Come with me. We’re going to try this tube thing. We have two cars down below.”

The woman said to follow her.

“I don’t want to bother anyone.”

The woman would go on foot and Coro would follow, behind the wheel. That’s what she proposed.

“It’s downhill. It’s fine.”

“Listen . . . Why don’t you bring your car up here?”

“I’m telling you, it’s downhill.”

“And if we don’t know how to transfer the fuel between tanks? Then I won’t be able to get back up.”

“You want gas, don’t you?”

She thought for a second.

�Ԩ���.”

“Well, come on.”

She started the car.

Very slowly, she began to follow the woman, staring at the bright spot of the flashlight leading the way, pointed at the ground. Down a dirt lane toward a house that emerged on the left after several minutes, and which appeared covered in the leaves or branches of several trees. Facing a potholed slope and enveloped in a darkness she wouldn’t know how to get out of.

The woman motioned for her to go even slower.

“Are you hungry?” she asked, coming over to the window.

“I just need a little gas. You wouldn’t have a can, would you?”

“You’re going to have to get out of there.”

At that point in the night, she was exhausted. She only just realized she had been breathing through her mouth for some time.

Waving her arms, the woman indicated where she should park, under a tree, where there were two other cars. Coro sighed and tried to calm herself. That woman was going to lend her a hand. She really was going to help her.

“Do you like the house? They say it was built by a single man.”

Just then, the lights came on in the first-floor windows and someone turned on a fluorescent outdoor bulb that completely illuminated the front of the house with an extraordinary white light.

“Some think all the lights should be left on, to discourage burglars. But I don’t know. Sometimes I think it’s better if they don’t know we’re here.”

Coro couldn’t see her face because the woman had positioned herself against the light. She could see, however, that another woman was coming out of the house, headed in their direction, carrying something. Five or six dogs also appeared, circling Coro and sniffing her.

“You’re not afraid of dogs, are you?”

She shook her head.

“Don’t be scared.”

“I’m not scared.”

The vagueness of the sky against the excessive light from the fluorescent bulb acted almost like a cupola. The place looked like a stage surrounded by trees.

“I’ve just taken it off the fire. Be careful.” The second woman handed Coro a mug, and she accepted it. It was scalding. It scorched her fingers. Her first impulse was to drop it. But she contained herself.

“C������ڳܱ�.”

“Shit!” she exclaimed.

The woman who gave her the mug made no expression whatsoever.

“Watch that mouth,” said the other.

“It’s boiling.”

She looked around for somewhere to set it down. In the company of those two women who watched her.

In an exercise of maximum self-control, after what seemed like hours, she set the mug on the hood of her car, spilling some of the liquid.

“Bring it here. I’ll hold it for you.”

“It’s boiling.”

“I warned you.”

“Nobody could drink that.”

“I warned you. We’ll wait until it cools.”

A nozzle hung from the side of the house, lit by the fluorescent bulb, fastened to the wall by a pipe and dripping a few centimeters from the bottom of a stone basin.

“Can I get some water?” she asked.

“It doesn’t work. Just drips.”

Coro brought her hands to mouth with the sensation that they were on fire. She went to the faucet and tried to turn it, but it was stuck.

“It doesn’t turn on or off. We told you.”

She brought her hands to her mouth again. They would be covered in blisters. She let the drops from the faucet wet her skin. She had hurt herself in the attempt to turn the lever and now her fingers shook.

A hoe and a rake were propped against the wall, beside the basin. And a wheelbarrow. The two women approached in silence, and when she turned around, she found them right behind her, fully illuminated by the fluorescent bulb. One had incredibly light brown eyes, almost golden, and the pair looked older now than she’d first imagined. They were slim and limber. They wore their hair pulled back and the same clothes, with identical boots. The same fabric for a pair of dresses equally threadbare and equally wrinkled. The woman who’d come from inside had put on a shawl.

Over their heads an immense tree grew. Carob, they told her.

“Can we try for the gas?” she asked.

“Wouldn’t you prefer to come inside? Sit down and have a drink?”

“You’re not going to help me?”

“We are helping you.”

Coro looked at the dogs still circling her. Coming and going. Peeing on the flowerpots. At the base of the tree hugging the trunk, ringing it, a row of bowls, cups, and tin cans were tied together with string and containing water and scraps.

“For the cats.”

“They get on well with the dogs.”

Coro couldn’t care less whether or not they got on. Whether they ripped each other apart or ate each other up. Whether they tore out their eyes or chewed off hunks of flesh.

“What’s wrong? You’re not afraid of us, are you? You’re the one who turned up at our gate.”

“You made me drive down here.”

“If you’re looking for property, it’s better to see it during the day. The land. The lake.”

“I told you, I’m lost.”

“Right, but no one gets lost around here.”

“Do you think the broth will have cooled by now?” the first woman asked the second.

“Not broth, milk.”

“Do you like milk? Everyone likes milk, don’t they?”

“What’s your name?”

She answered and the women laughed.

“Coro? What kind of name is that? Where are you from?”

They told her the name didn’t exist and she thought that she should get back in the car. She always had that option. That blessed option. Only then would she be calmer. Getting into the car and locking the doors. Staying inside.

“You don’t want to come in?”

The two women watched her.

“You’re obviously tired.”

“Here. Drink.”

They handed her the mug again. Firmly. Coro brought it indecisively to her lips, but she drank. All of it. Asking herself how she could be there. How had she been able to leave her phone at home. What was happening to her.

It was still hot.

“Better? You feel better, don’t you?”

Did she feel better?

“Come on, relax a bit.”

“Do you want to come in?”

��by Pilar Adón & Katie Whittemore is available from (30% off before 12/1/24), , and better bookstores everywhere!

As a special promo for Three Percent Podcast fans, use the code PILAR at check out and get 20% off��.��

The music on this episode is “” by Florence + The Machine.

If you don’t already subscribe to the Three Percent Podcast you can find us on and other places. And follow and on Twitter/X for more info about upcoming episodes and guests.

Today, we’re going to revisit a wild TMR season in which we featured three books originally written in Spanish, all published right around the start of the pandemic . . . Below, you’ll find info and links to all the episodes on��Cars on Fire��by Mónica Ramón Ríos & Robin Myers, Four by Four��by Sara Mesa & Katie Whittemore, and The Book of Anna��by Carmen Boullosa & Samantha Schnee.

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We started this season off with . Here’s the jacket copy:

“When you live in an adopted country, when you’re an exile in your own body, names are simply lists that dull the reality of death.”

Cars on Fire, Mónica Ramón Ríos’s electric, uncompromising English-language debut, unfolds through a series of characters—the writer, the patient, the immigrant, the professor, the student—whose identities are messy and ever-shifting. A speechwriter is employed writing for would-be dictators, but plays in a rock band as a means of protest. A failed Marxist cuts off her own head as a final poetic act. With incredible formal range, from the linear to the more free-wheeling, the real to the fantastical to the dystopic,��Ríos��offers striking, jarring glimpses into life as a woman and an immigrant. Set in New York City, New Jersey, and Chile’s La Zona Central, the stories in��Cars on Fire��offer powerful remembrances to those lost to violence, and ultimately make the case for the power of art, love, and feminine desire to subvert the oppressive forces—xenophobia, neoliberalism, social hierarchies within the academic world—that shape life in Chile and the United States.

And here are links to each Cars on Fire episode:

Episode 1: Pages 1-63 (, , )

Episode 2: Pages 64-151 (, , )

Episode 3: Pages 152-End (, , )

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Then we moved on to��. Here’s the jacket copy:

Set entirely at Wybrany College—a school where the wealthy keep their kids safe from the chaos erupting in the cities—Four by Four��is a novel of insinuation and gossip, in which the truth about Wybrany’s “program” is always palpable, but never explicit. The mysteries populating the novel open with the disappearance of one of the “special,” scholarship students. As the first part unfolds, it becomes clear that all is not well in Wybrany, and that something more sordid lurks beneath the surface.

In the second part—a self-indulgent, wry diary written by an imposter who has infiltrated the school as a substitute teacher—the eerie sense of what’s happening in this space removed from society, becomes more acute and potentially sinister.

An exploration of the relationship between the powerful and powerless—and the repetition of these patterns—Mesa’s “sophisticated nightmare” calls to mind great works of gothic literature (think Shirley Jackson) and social thrillers to create a unique, unsettling view of freedom and how a fear of the outside world can create monsters.

And here are links to each Four by Four episode:

Episode 4: Pages 1-86 (, , )

Episode 5: Pages 87-156 (, , )

Episode 6: Pages 156-222 (, , )

Episode 7: Pages 223-End (, , )

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And we wrapped things up with��. Here’s the jacket copy:

IN THIS CONTINUATION OF ANNA KARENINA’S LEGACY, RUSSIA SIMMERS ON THE BRINK OF CHANGE AND THE STORIES THAT HAVE LONG BEEN KEPT SECRET FINALLY COME TO LIGHT.

Saint Petersburg, 1905. Behind the gates of the Karenin Palace, Sergei, son of Anna Karenina, meets Tolstoy in his dreams and finds reminders of his mother everywhere: the vivid portrait that the tsar intends to acquire and the opium-infused manuscripts Anna wrote just before her death, which open a trapdoor to a wild feminist fairy tale. Across the city, Clementine, an anarchist seamstress, and Father Gapon, the charismatic leader of the proletariat, plan protests that embroil the downstairs members of the Karenin household in their plots and tip the country ever closer to revolution. Boullosa tells a polyphonic and subversive tale of the Russian revolution through the lens of Tolstoy’s most beloved work.

Episode 8: Pages 1-73 (, , )

Episode 9: Pages 74-98 (, , )

Episode 10: Pages 99-126 (, , )

Episode 11: Pages 127-161 (, , )

Episode 12: Pages 162-End (, , )

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Enjoy!

And while you’re here, you should get a copy of�� and be ready for Season Twenty of TMR starting on September 6th!

Today’s #WITMonth post is an except from

Here’s the jacket copy:

Subtly in the vein of��Dogville��or Coetzee’s��Disgrace, and invoking the works of Agota Kristof,��Un Amor��probes ideas of language, alienation, and community through the eyes of a woman who, when brought into conflict, finds herself on the potential brink of deeper awareness of herself and her place in the world.

On the heels of a cryptic mistake, Nat arrives in La Escapa, an arid rural village in Spain’s interior. She settles into a small, shabby house with cheap rent to begin work on her first literary translation, with a skittish and ill-tempered dog—a gift from the boorish landlord—her only company.

Burdened with assumptions about country life, Nat will enter into relationships with the handful of local inhabitants—her negligent landlord, Píter the hippie, the dementia-afflicted Roberta, the young city family who comes on weekends, the unsociable man they call “The German”—from whom she appears to receive a customary welcome.

Mutual misunderstanding and a persistent sense of alienation, however, thrum below the surface. And when conflicts arise over repairs to the house, Nat receives an offer and makes a crucial decision.

In prose as taut and oppressive as the atmosphere in La Escapa,��Un Amor��extends Mesa’s exploration of language and power, confronting readers with the limits of their own morality as tensions mount and the community’s most unexpected impulses emerge.

This book—like so many of Mesa’s—is a slow burn, with tension increasing with every event, every turn of the page. The except below is from the first section of the book, setting the scene, introducing a few key characters, and creating the atmosphere of this part of rural Spain. Enjoy!

Un Amor is available for preorder from better bookstores everywhere, our , , or

She’d be hard pressed to come up with a convincing answer if asked to explain what she was doing there. That’s why she hedges when the time comes, babbling about a change of scenery.

“People must think you’re crazy, right?”

The cashier smacks gum as she piles Nat’s shopping on the counter. It’s the only store in a few-mile radius, an unmarked establishment where foodstuffs and hygiene products accumulate in a jumble. Shopping there is expensive and the pickings are slim, but Nat is reluctant to take the car to Petacas. She rummages in her wallet and counts out the bills she needs.

The girl from the shop is in a chatty mood. Brazen, she asks Nat all about her life, flustering her. The girl wishes she could do what Nat’s done, but the opposite, she says. Move to Cárdenas, where stuff actually happens.

“Living here sucks. There aren’t even any guys!”

She tells Nat that she used to go to high school in Petacas, but she dropped out. She doesn’t like studying, she’s crap at every subject. Now she helps out in the shop. Her mom gets chronic migraines, and her dad also does some farming, so she lends a hand at the store. But as soon as she turns eighteen, she’s out of there. She could be a cashier in Cárdenas, or a nanny. She’s good with kids. The few kids who ever make it to La Escapa, she smiles.

“This place sucks,” she repeats.

It’s the girl who tells Nat about the people living in the surrounding houses and farms. She tells her about the gypsy family squatting in a dilapidated farmhouse, right near the ramp for the highway. A bus picks up the kids every morning; they’re the only kids who live in La Escapa year-round. And there’s the old couple in the yellow house. The woman is some kind of witch, the girl claims. She can predict the future and read your mind.

“She’s a little crazy, so it’s creepy,” the girl laughs.

She tells Nat about the hippie in the wooden house, and the guy they call “The German” even though he isn’t from Germany, and Gordo’s bar—though to call the storehouse where they serve up bottles of beer a bar is, she admits, a bit of an exaggeration. There are other people who come and go according to the rhythms of the countryside, dayworkers hired for two-week stints or just the day, but also whole families who have inherited houses they can’t manage to sell and who live somewhere else half the year. But you never see women on their own. Not women Nat’s age, she specifies.

“Old ladies don’t count.”

During the first days, Nat gets confused and mixes up all that information, partly because she’d listened absently, partly because she’s in unfamiliar territory. La Escapa’s borders are blurry, and even though there is a relatively compact cluster of small houses—where hers is located—other buildings are scattered farther off, some inhabited and others not. From the outside, Nat can’t tell whether they’re homes or barns, if there are people inside or just livestock. She loses her bearings on the dirt roads and if it weren’t for the shop—which sometimes feels more familiar to her than the house she’s rented and slept in for a week—as a point of reference, she’d feel lost. The area isn’t even very pretty, although at sunset, when the edges soften and the light turns golden, she finds a kind of beauty she can cling to.

Nat takes her grocery bags and says goodbye to the girl. But before she exits the shop, she turns back and asks about the landlord. Does the girl know him? The girl purses her lips, shakes her head slowly. No, not really, she says. He’s lived in Petacas for a long time.

“But I do remember seeing him around here when I was little. He always had a pack of dogs and a really bad temper. Then he got married, or got together with someone, and left. I guess his wife didn’t want to live in La Escapa—can’t blame her. This place is worse for girls. Even though Petacas is nothing special—I wouldn’t want to live there either, no way.”

*

Sara Mesa

She tries to play with the dog, tossing him an old ball she found in the woodpile. But instead of catching it and bringing it back, the dog limps away. When she crouches down next to him, putting herself on his level so he won’t be afraid, he skulks off with his tail between his legs. The dog is a piece of work, she thinks, a real rotter. Sieso, they’d call him in the part of Spain she comes from. It seems a good a name as any—after all, she has to call him something. It certainly describes his surly nature. But Sieso is as inscrutable as he is unsociable. He hangs around, but it’s like he wasn’t there at all. Why should she have to settle for a dog like that? Even the little dog in the shop, an extremely anxious Chihuahua mix, is much nicer. All the dogs she meets on the roads—and there are tons of them—run over when she calls. A lot of them are looking to be fed, of course, but also to be pet; they are nosy and curious, wanting to know who this new girl in the neighborhood is. Sieso doesn’t even seem interested in eating. If she feeds him, great, and if not, that’s fine too. The landlord wasn’t kidding: the animal’s upkeep is cheap. Sometimes Nat is ashamed of the aversion she feels toward the animal. She asked for a dog and here he is. Now she cannot—must not—say—or even think—that she doesn’t want him.

One morning at the shop, she meets the hippie, as the girl called him. Now she languidly waits on them both, smoking a cigarette with no sense of urgency. The hippie is a little older than Nat, though he can’t be more than forty. Tall and strong, his skin is weathered by the sun, his hands broad and cracked, his eyes hard but placid. He wears his hair long in a terrible cut and his beard is on the reddish side. Why the girl calls him “hippie” is something Nat can only guess. Maybe it’s his long hair or because he is someone who, like Nat, comes from the city, a stranger, something incomprehensible for anyone who has lived in La Escapa since childhood and can only think of getting away. The truth is, the hippie has lived there a long time. He is, therefore, nothing novel, not like Nat. She observes him from the corner of her eye, his efficient movements, concise and confident. As she waits her turn, she pats the back of the dog he has brought with him. She’s a chocolate Labrador, old but undeniably elegant. The dog wags her tail and noses Nat’s crotch. The three of them laugh.

“What a good girl,” Nat says.

The hippie nods and holds out his hand. Then he changes his mind, withdraws it and moves in to kiss her. Just one kiss on the cheek, which causes Nat to remain with her face tilted, waiting for the second kiss that doesn’t come. He tells her his name: Píter. With an i, he specifies: P-í-t-e-r. At least that’s how he likes to spell it, except when he’s forced to write it officially. The less one writes one’s real name, the better, he jokes. It’s only good for signing checks at the bank, for those thieves.

“Natalia,” she introduces herself.

Then comes the obligatory question: what is she doing in La Escapa? He’s seen her out on the trails and also saw her tidying up the area around the house. Is she going to live there? Alone? Nat feels awkward. She would prefer that nobody watch her while she works, especially without her knowledge, which is inevitable because the boundaries of the property are marked only by fine wire mesh, denuded of vegetation. She tells him she’s only staying a couple of months.

“I’ve seen the dog, too. You got him here, right?”

“How do you know?”

Píter confesses that he knows the animal. One of the landlord’s many. That dog, in fact, is probably the worst of the lot. Her landlord will pick them up wherever, doesn’t train them, doesn’t vaccinate them, doesn’t care for them in the slightest. He uses, then abandons, them. Did she ask for the dog? She can be sure the landlord has given her the most useless one he had.

Nat considers this and the man suggests she give the dog back. There’s no reason to settle if he isn’t what she wanted. The landlord isn’t a good guy, he says, she’s better off keeping her distance. He doesn’t like to speak badly of anyone, he insists, but the landlord is another matter. Always thinking about how to scam people.

“I can get you a dog if you want.”

The conversation leaves Nat uneasy. Sitting on her doorstep with a lukewarm bottle of beer—the fridge, too, is on the fritz—she watches Sieso sleeping beside the fence, stretched out in the sunshine. The flies loiter on his slightly swollen belly, where the marks of old wounds are visible.

The thought of returning him is deeply unsettling.

*

Katie Whittemore

She is surprised by the activity in Petacas. It takes her a while to find parking; the layout of the roads is so chaotic and the signage so contradictory that once you enter the town, an unexpected detour can easily take you right out of it again. The houses are modest, their façades worse for the wear and mostly plain, but there are brick buildings, too, up to six stories tall, distributed arbitrarily here and there. The businesses are clustered around the main square; the town hall—an ostentatious building with large eaves and stained-glass windows—is surrounded by small bars and Chinese-owned bazaars. Nat buys a small fan at one of them. Then she wanders in search of a hardware store, reluctant to ask for directions. She is struck by the neglected appearance of the women, who have left the house with unkempt hair and slip-on sandals. Many of the men—even the old ones—are in sleeveless shirts. The few children she sees are unsupervised, licking popsicles, scampering, rolling on the ground. The people—men, women, kids—all of whom are loud and sloppy, look strangely alike. Inbreeding, Nat thinks. Her landlord is a perfect fit.

She worries about running into him, but it’s Píter, not the landlord, whom she meets in the hardware store. She is happy to see him: someone she knows, someone friendly, someone smiling at her at last, coming over, what are you doing here, he asks. Nat shows him the box with the fan and he scowls. Why didn’t she ask the landlord? It’s his responsibility to keep the property in habitable condition. Not air conditioning, obviously, but a fan at least.

“Or you could have asked me. That’s what neighbors are for.”

Nat looks for an excuse. She’s happy to buy one, she says. She’ll take it with her when she leaves La Escape. Píter looks at her askance, pretending not to believe her.

“And what are you buying here? Tools to fix everything he left broken?”

Nat shakes her head.

“No. Stuff for the garden.”

“You’re planting a garden?”

“Well, just something basic . . . Peppers and eggplants, they’re easy, I guess. I want to try, at least.”

Píter takes her by the arm, steps closer.

“Don’t buy anything,” he whispers.

He tells her that he can lend her all the tools she needs. He says, too, that she might as well forget about a garden. Nothing’s grown on her land in years; the soil is totally depleted; it would take days and days of hard work to get it into shape. If she insists—Nat hangs on that word, insists—he could lend her a hand, but he absolutely advises against it. Although he speaks smoothly, Píter’s voice contains indisputable sureness, an expert’s confidence. Nat nods, waits for him to finish his shopping. Cables, adaptors, screws, a pair of pliers: all very professional, very specific, nothing at all like the indefiniteness in which she operates.

Outside, Píter walks beside her at an athletic pace, straight but flexible. His way of moving is so elegant, so different from the people around them, that Nat is proud to be walking next to him, the sort of pride associated with feeling legitimate. The spell breaks when he points to the windows at the town hall.

“Pretty, aren’t they? I made them.”

Nat thinks the windows clash terribly with the building’s exposed brick, but she is all praise: they suit it perfectly, she says. Píter looks at her appreciatively. Precisely, he says, that’s what he seeks, for his work to befit its context.

“Petacas isn’t the nicest place in the world, but—to the extent possible—one should strive to beautify one’s surroundings, don’t you think?”

“So, you’re a . . .” Nat doesn’t know what you call a person who makes stained-glass windows.

“A glazier? Yes. Well, more than a glazier. A glass and color artisan, you might say. Like, I don’t just cover windows.”

“Of course.” Nat smiles.

They have a beer in one of the bars on the square. The beer is ice-cold and goes down easy. Píter observes her closely—too closely, she thinks—but his eyes are sweet and that softens her discomfort. The conversation returns to the landlord—that cheeky bastard, he repeats—the tools and her barren plot. He insists on lending her what she needs. Just a matter of tidying the yard, clearing space for a table and some lawn chairs, then planting a few oleander and yucca, or some succulents suitable for the harsh climate. There’s a huge nursery near Petacas, very cheap. If she wants, one day they can go together. It seems her plans for a vegetable garden have been scrapped. She doesn’t mention them again.

Again Un Amor is available for preorder from better bookstores everywhere, our , , or

Officially out last Tuesday,

From the recent :

Below is an excerpt—translated by Katie Whittemore, whose translation of this novel is as ambitious and admirable as the book itself—from a section when Juan is approaching the US-Mexico border, and is in a place like Ciudad Juarez.

You can purchase ��from better bookstores everywhere, , , or .

*

Juan opens his eyes in the dark, not waking completely. He stays like that for a time, on the edge of his dream. He’s on the train, he thinks at first. And then: I’ve fallen off the train, the train has run over my legs, my arms, my head. He is surprised to be alive, if that darkness isn’t actually death. I’m dreaming, he thinks. I’m in Navaja’s car. I’m in the Chichimeca desert. On his horse. In the arms of the Little Widow. In the arms of my wife. Then he perceives the faint outline of square window, and on the other side, the red and yellow lights of automobiles speeding past on the highway. Much more slowly, memories return to him, in ambiguous waves. He feels along the wall until he encounters what turns out to be a switch and the light from the lamp blinds him like the flash of a gunshot. Gradually he comes into a heavy, viscous awareness of his surroundings. The lamp. The vase where the same withered flowers languish. The bed, his bed, immune to the train’s violent jerking and his horse’s trot. Finally, he remembers, or decides he remembers. Everything is calm. Only the same rhythmic sound persists; not the Beast’s vibration, but a hand knocking on his door.

He stands to open that door.

He sees a very young woman on the other side. A girl whose childhood. has been diligently erased, with deep red lipstick and dabs of makeup. She has a bottle of tequila in one hand and two small glasses in the other. A certain expression of neglect. Her eyes shine with a light that is at once familiar and remote.

“Can I come in, papaíto?”

She can. She does so, slowly, hesitant, with her too-short skirt, flesh-colored bra, and swing of her cheap earrings. She sets the bottle and glasses on the night table and then turns to him with something that isn’t quite determination but aspires to be.

“You’re not going to sit?”

Because she is already sitting on the bed, on the very edge of the bed, as if she would like to occupy as little space as possible. Juan is still standing, his hand on the door handle, looking at the girl’s bare legs. Her hands, so small, as if created to hold a piece of art. Her white throat. In some ways, she reminds him of the women he saw advertised from the train, depicted on huge signs on both sides of the train track; women who were stunningly beautiful but also a little faded, mistreated by the elements.

“They call me the Güerita,” the Güerita says.

“I’m Juan.”

“I know. They told me you’d be waiting for me.”

He waits a few moments before closing the door. Then he sits down beside the girl. He opens the bottle and fills both glasses. The girl accepts hers in silence; her hands don’t meet around the glass. She isn’t even looking at it. Her eyes have just discovered the book on the night table, open to the Padrote’s page.

“You know him?”

The Güerita is about to reply, but in the end says nothing. Her eyes are fixed on him again, with an intensity that might be confused for fear. Eyes very open but simultaneously afraid, as if they were plumbing the depths of a well. At first, Juan doesn’t catch the significance of that look.

“Am I so like him?”

She nods slightly. The glass doesn’t quite make it to her lips.

“Navaja says you’re brothers.”

“H������-�����dzٳ�����.”

They drink from their glasses at the same time. Between them, a silence has opened, made not only from a few centimeters of mattress, but from minutes or centuries of distance.

“He was the one who brought you here, right?” Juan asks.

�Ԩ���.”

Juan takes another drink, long and full, to decide what he needs to ask.

“Did he force you?”

She shakes her head so vigorously she almost spills. No, no he didn’t force her. The Padrote, his brother, his half-brother that is, is a good man. If she’s there, it’s because it’s her choice; she wants to make that clear. She entered prostitution with all five senses, nobody forced her. She was looking for an opportunity to earn some pesos and the Padrote gave it to her. How could that be bad?

“You’re here because you want to be.”

�Ԩ���.”

The girl takes another swig of tequila. It’s a long swig, deliberate, long enough to decide what she is going to say next.

“The Padrote is a good man,” she repeats.

*

Juan Gómez Bárcena

The girl’s life encompasses twenty-one years—or that’s what the girl says, at least, although she doesn’t look more than eighteen—and takes as long to be recounted as the time she needs to empty three glasses of tequila. She talks about herself this way sometimes, in the third person, as if hers was a story she could better understand from a distance or from greater heights. Maybe this is why it doesn’t exactly seem to be a person’s life, but a chronicle of a character who never existed or the obituary of a girl already dead. There are, as in all the stories Juan has heard, certain common elements. The south. A birthplace that was poor or hungry or wretched. To the north, a drain that swallows up everything it touches, first her papa, then her mama; later, her older and younger siblings. One day, the gravitational force of that drain would end up catching her, too. She was eighteen at the time, although it seems to Juan that when the girl says twenty-one she means eighteen and fifteen when she says eighteen. Before setting off, she was told to leave behind anything that could identify her at home, so goodbye passport, library card, bills. Even shopping receipts. She was also told to neutralize her accent, because then there was no way to find out where she came from, and they’d have nowhere to deport her to. She followed those instructions to a T, and now nobody can guess her nationality. Try if you don’t believe me, papa.to, she says. Don’t know? Her clients often try, and they almost always fail. Guatemala, they say. Salvador, Honduras. They’ve even taken her for Argentine. And she says: Nope, nope, nope. But I’m going to tell you, papaíto. I’m Nicaraguan. From Managua. But only to you: to the police, I’m pure Mexican. Although if she really thinks about it, she says, staring into her glass, what is pure Mexican? What purity is there in anything, if we’re not talking about pure heroin or purebred dogs, which, by the way, die sooner the purer they are. Well. They told her not to take anything and nothing was what she took. Nothing except a few hundred dollars in her socks, and a suitcase with a change of clothes and a Virgin of Guadalupe prayer card. She packed the prayer card face up, so the Virgen could breathe. And the journey had its setbacks and its small tragedies; not all of those who accompanied her had the same luck, but thanks to God nothing happened to her, the Beast was good to her, maybe it respected her because she prayed a lot to the Virgin or maybe—and it scares her to think this—it was nothing but chance, plain and simple. The fact is she reached the border in ten or twelve days, safe and sound and with most of the dollars still balled up in her left sock. But in the end, it turned out she didn’t have enough for the crossing; the prices changed year to year, and in the previous eighteen months, the polleros’ fees had gone up: supply and demand, sister, they told her, this is America, this is the free market. And so she tried—unsuccessfully— to climb the border wall, along with two guys who also didn’t have the money to pay the pollero. And then they tried to swim across the Río Bravo—successfully, in a sense, because even though she didn’t manage to reach the other side, she didn’t drown either, not like one of the boys did. It was in that moment, soaked to the bone and shaking, when she decided to give up the dream, or a specific part of the dream, and settled down right here. In this city that kisses the border with El Paso and from that kiss, from that species of encounter or chat or intercourse between the two cities, nothing good is born. A city with a gentleman’s name, but that was better suited to the name of a murdered female, and there are so many to choose from. Of course, back then she didn’t know anything about this city, nothing about the murdered women, nothing, really, about almost anything. The worst thing about poverty, the girl says, is that it’s not just your pockets that are empty, but your head, too. It costs money to know certain things. And she had nothing, knew nothing, just what was advertised on TV, that Coca-Cola is life and that it’s a good time for the great taste of McDonald’s; that Vicente Fox is the change you need and Felipe Calderón wants you to catch his passion for México and you know that Peña Nieto will deliver. Because advertising, the girl says, is free. It might be the only free thing in this world. Anyway. She arrived in this city whose name she doesn’t want to remember with very little, with a couple hundred dollars and the address of her sister-in-law’s friend written on the back of a flyer. Her sister-in-law’s friend took her in as best she knew and could manage. The next day, that woman got her a job at one of the city’s textile factories. Because sewing was among the few things the girl knew how to do. There, in that sort of stable or hothouse or mammoth cathedral, where all the people were women, bent over their sewing machines, strafing scraps of yellow canvas. It was so bright indoors that outside always looked like night. Very white light, like a highway gasworks. Or a hospital waiting room. Or the front window of a cafeteria open twenty-four hours. In fact, the factory was open twenty-fours a day, and inside you could eat lunch, shower, even work out in a kind of gym. When she earned enough, the girl told herself, she would cross the border. And that, earning enough, might still take a few months, because the pay was, shall we say, somewhere between low and really low, but her sister-in-law’s friend told her no, they couldn’t complain, especially considering what was going on. The girl, who knew nothing, nonetheless knew, or intuited, something, or rather she believed something in a blind and irrational way, a way she herself couldn’t explain. She knew things had always been bad. And that they would continue to be bad. And that the poor would continue to find reasons not to complain. She was poor and—in accordance with her own theory—she didn’t complain. Besides, what was there to complain about, what with the trimestral bonuses for employees and labor conventions, her sister-in-law’s friend recited, impassioned; there were prizes for attendance and prizes for performance, employee of the month, employee of the week, social security, free uniform laundry service; they took out a life insurance policy for you while you were alive and paid for your funeral if, God forbid, you died. It was enough for the girl because the girl was going to leave. But between leaving and not leaving, while she machine-gunned scraps of yellow canvas in that stable or cathedral or hothouse, while she shared a mattress in a shared room in a shared apartment, while those things were happening, she says, other things were happening that she disregarded, at least in the beginning. There were tiny notices in the papers, between the crime section and the horoscopes. Flyers pasted on bus shelters or streetlights, and on them the faces and names of very young girls. Girls who weren’t old enough. Old enough for what? What does she know, old enough to be alone, to be lost; to be, basically, all blurry in a black and white photograph, as if their own disappearance had caught them off guard. It’s true that, in time, all or almost all of them turned up, poor things, mutilated and dirty with dust and blood, abandoned in the empty lots in Lomas de Poleo or the landfills of Santa Elena or the Cerro Bola hillside, under a jumbo inscription written in whitewash that said READ THE BIBLE. Just like that, in the imperative: Read the Bible. They turned up around there, and the newspaper devoted the same tiny space to them again, only now they were a female cadaver, and in the days following the press release someone, merciful or pragmatic, went around taking down the flyers with those photos that looked like they’d been taken for a First Communion. Other times, other bodies turned up, bodies no one identified or claimed, women for whom nobody had put up posters, and then the press release was even smaller. This is awful, I would say to my sister-in-law’s friend, the girl says, although it’s probably fairer to say that by that time she was not so much the sister-in-law’s friend as her own. The girl’s. What’s awful? the friend would ask. Well, the stuff about those poor little girls. And she, the girl’s friend, would gesture with whatever she had in her hand, a little scrap of yellow canvas, for example, she would make that gesture and say that it was sad, of course it was sad, but those little girls weren’t little girls; most of them, in fact, were lost. The girl didn’t understand: well of course they’re lost, haven’t you seen the posters? But her sister-in-law’s friend, the girl’s friend, didn’t mean that. She meant that they worked in prostitution, did she get it? They took drugs or sold them or both. They went out alone at night or in bad company or tempting men in roadside bars. They were girls who paid for the trip north with their bodies, the body’s ATM, the cuerpomático—and on saying this, cuerpomático—the sister-in- law’s friend touched her breasts. Oh, the girl says she responded at the time. That was all. And she was left thinking about the pictures she’d seen on the posters, which looked like they were from a First Communion, or a quinceñera at most. She thought about that for a few days, about their First Communions, about where and how they had celebrated their fifteenth birthdays, and about how their parents must have suffered over the bad lives their daughters were living.

*

Word by word, drink by drink, the girl has drained her glass. Now she fills it again. Time for the second tequila has come and with it, the heaviest part of her story. Because the factory where the girl worked might have had labor agreements, and prizes for attendance and prizes for performance, and employee of the month, employee of the week, and social security, free laundry service for their uniforms, but it also had a very strict policy about punctuality. If you got to work late, even just a minute late, you didn’t get in. Two minutes. That was how late the sister-in-law’s friend was, the friend who was, by that time, the girl’s friend. At least that’s how the girl would remember her: as her friend. That’s how she has been fossilized in her memory: the wee hours of one morning in some summer month in such-and-such a year. It was two minutes past midnight: that she can state with certainty. Two minutes late and they wouldn’t let her in. That was as much as the girl knew and what she would later tell the police, when at eight o’clock in the morning she got home, never to see her friend again. She didn’t actually tell the police right at that time, because first she wanted to be patient, wait a couple of hours, and then because the Mexican police have their procedures and protocols. One was required to wait so many hours, entire days, before filing a report. How many hours, how many days? The girl doesn’t recall. What she does remember is that the commissioner who met with her was very gentlemanly, very polite, he pulled out a chair for her and even asked how she liked her coffee. She asked for it with a splash of milk because she’d heard that was a classy way to order, with a splash of milk, although she didn’t even like milk and only sort of liked coffee; but she was weakened by her tears and intended to please the police every way she could. I-don’t-know-what percentage of the muchachitas—that’s what he called them, “muchachitas”—reappear within seventy-two hours of their own volition. That’s what the commissioner said. The girl doesn’t remember the figure: it was a high percentage. And the other percent? she asked, coffee cup trembling in her hand. The commissioner raised his eyebrows. A short time later, they called to tell her that her friend belonged to the small percentage, not the large group. It wasn’t the norm: at least not according to the statistics. There were inquiries. There were witnesses who said they’d seen a black car stopped at the factory entrance, and also a white motorcycle, and a car that was a sort of a pistachio yellow. There was a small press release. There were posters with a blurry photograph. Her sister-in-law’s friend was nineteen and in the only picture the girl had of her, she was smiling and winking at the camera. That was how the neighbors would see her, multiplied and laminated and cyclostyled by the city’s streetlights and bus shelters. One afternoon, after posting a dozen leaflets around a block far from the apartment, she overheard a conversation between two boys who stopped to look at one of posters. The picture of her winking friend. She didn’t hear or didn’t recall hearing what the first kid said. But the second kid replied: One of those girls with the body’s ATM, he said, grabbing his balls. She started to cry and the boys asked her if she needed help and she answered that she didn’t need any help thank-you-very-much. But she didn’t cry, however, when the police called her. Identifying the body wasn’t as hard as she’d imagined, either: by then, she’d had lots of time to read plenty about the girls who got lost in that city. She knew what she could expect. She knew about ritualistic mutilations, nipples bitten off, rampageous rapes, the female cadavers—as they were called—that turned up with stiff arms, as if embracing the air; as if they were still embracing the last man who fucked them. In gynecologic positions, the experts said, which meant that the thing never ended, that, even dead, they looked like they were still getting fucked. As for her friend, the murder or murderers respected her, all things considered. Up to a certain point, at least. The deceased’s demise was caused by strangulation, and most certainly occurred the same day as the kidnapping. She had been raped, yes, but only vaginally; no matter how thoroughly they explored her rectum, no signs of abrasion, tearing, or dilation were found. That, the absence of anal rape, was of great consternation to the medical examiner. The modus operandi, he said with a sigh, appears to have changed. But she, the girl, wasn’t interested in the modus operandi. Over the preceding weeks she had read everything she could get her hands on about the wave of femicides, in the papers or online—because her factory, in addition to paying for your funeral if, God forbid, you died, also had a kind of employee internet café where they could call their relatives or play solitaire or do whatever they liked. She knew as much as could be known about the subject, which wasn’t a lot. She knew the guilty party was a serial killer who mimicked other serial killers, imitators in theory but just as lethal in practice. She knew blame lay with the patriarchy. She knew blame lay with excess: an excess of women and an excess of desert. Blame lay with the gringos, who crossed the border like they were going on safari, hunters ready to claim their female trophies. Blame lay with the Mexicans, who no longer believed in the Virgin of Guadalupe with the intensity of yesteryear. Blame lay with the government. With the narcos. With the narco-government. Blame lay with the women, who walked alone. Blame lay with the women, who walked in bad company. Blame lay with the women, who were pretty. Blame lay with shamanic rituals and black magic and the Santa Muerte and the Aztecs. Blame lay with living like this, partway between the city and the desert, between Mexico and the United States, between Heaven and Hell, on that irresolute land between something and nothing. Blame lay with values, with a lack of values. Blame lay with poverty. Blame lay with the desert. That’s what the girl read, and read, and read, like she’d read ads before, other claims, other highway signs and leaflets and billboards. Fuck it all. The factory, too: fuck it. As the deceased’s next of kin—her? she was her sister-in-law’s friend’s next of kin?—she was left a bit of money. With that money, she bought what she had come to buy. Prices had gone up again—supply and demand, sister, free market—but still she had enough, she had enough, and when she went to hand over the bill to the pollero, the girl, who, until that moment, had known nothing, nonetheless knew, or intuited, something, or rather believed something blindly, irrationally, in a way she herself could not reasonably explain: that the price of her friend’s cheap death meant that she’d have to pay so dearly for the passage.

*

The end of the story lives at the bottom of the third glass of tequila. The girl looks down at it, and looks again before she finishes.

*

Purchase ��from better bookstores everywhere, , , or .

For a year after graduation from Michigan State—while I was waiting for my then future wife (aka, No. 1 X-wife?) to complete her degree—I did nothing but read for the English GRE and explore all the books that I had been dying to get to, but never had time for when I was in school. I devoured every Pynchon book, Coover (The Public Burning in particular), William Gaddis, Wittgenstein, every Kathy Acker book, any and all pop-sci books about quantum mechanics and string theory, and some random academic books since, at the time, I had aspirations of going on to get a PhD. (Foolish Young Chad! Bad at love, bad at career choices!)

One of the academic books I really liked at the time was ��by Susan Strehle. (Two great obsessions—fiction and “quantum”—that taste great together?) There’s a chance I’m misremembering this (or applying quantum ideas, there’s a chance that I’m both right and wrong and no one will know the outcome until they observe Strehle “Schröedinger’s” Index), but it was there and then that I first came across the name “Ann Quin.”

In a book about Pynchon, Barthelme, Atwood, and the like, a reference to Quin��feels��likely, although I think she was mentioned in a toss-away comment, one of those classic, “another author who mines this vein of theoretical underpinnings is Ann Quin, an experimental British novelist from the 1960s, who isn’t well-known these days” sort of bits. As vague as the reference was—in Strehle’s book, or whatever actual book I’ve replaced with hers in my memory—I was INSTANTLY INTRIGUED.

This took place in the way back, pre-Wikipedia, squarely in the dial-up era of the “information superhighway,” but I remember reading��something��about how Ann Quin could be considered a Kathy Acker precursor. Not a one-to-one comparison, but a fellow traveler on the experimental, NON-MALE, mode of storytelling. And that her “wildest” book was��Tripticks, which included Goo-era Sonic Youth illustrations:

(All the illustrations in��Tripticks��are by Quin’s lover, Carol Annand.)

For whatever reason—that her books were really only issued in the UK by Marion Boyars Publishers, that online interlibrary loan requests were a few years in the future, that��Amazon.com didn’t yet exist—I couldn’t get ahold of these books to save my life. Every new or used bookstore I entered I would pass by “P” for “Pynchon” and end up at “Q” for “Quindlen.” (I think Quindlen has lead a very successful life as a writer, but to me, she’ll forever be “the Q-named author who��isn’t��Ann Quin.”) This is a specific flavor of Nerd Disappointment some of you relate to. (And the rest of you make money with your actual hands and bodies like smart folk.)

Worth noting though that I did discover Raymond Queneau in this “Q”-related search.

[Side-note: If any QAnon people end up on here because I’m Q-ing it up like a Trump-liever, spread the fucking word! For every one of you nutjobs who contributes to our , we’ll find a Q-nugget in Quin’s books that presage your mysterious figure. Don’t worry: Quin’s poetic prose is dripping��in potential conspiratorial clues. Tune in, weekly—and donate $5 a month—and we’ll enlighten you.]

[[Three Percenters? You, on the other hand, can go fuck right off. I’ve owned Google search results over you before, and I will again. Eat my words, “patriots.”]]

*

Fast-forward a few years, and I was starting out at Dalkey, recommending authors to reissue I had heard��of, like, IDK, Ann Quin, and, lo and behold, John O’Brien pulls from his shelves all four of her novels. And thus a weekend is wasted.

And a few conversations with Catheryn Kilgarriff later, Dalkey had put together a four-book project to reissue this unique author who, despite all her advances in the realm of what literature can do, she—much like her compatriot B.S. Johnson (a future TMR subject? I could talk for, conservatively, 7 hours about House Mother Normal��and the statistics describing the current abilities of one’s senses: “Sight: 10%”), died way way too young of suicide in 1973.

RIP Experimental British Writing for a good couple of decades. (Or at least the best chance it had of going “mainstream.”)

*

It’s been twenty-one years since I read Ann Quin.

Since that time, And Other Stories capitalized on Dalkey’s negligence (aka, a monomaniacally-run dictatorship of a press whose empire was slowly crumbling) and started reissuing her—along with a collection of previously unpublished stories and fragments entilted, The Unmapped Country after her unfinished final novel—Bob Buckeye has written a critical book, , the literary world has caught up to the spirit behind her works, if not the specific structures and twists of language and grammar, and she’s even been featured in the .

*

But what do Ann Quin’s works mean today? Can a contemporary writer draw from her, from her poetic play, her constant urge to expand and explore and truly experiment? How do readers relate to, in , the author who “turned��On the Road��on its head”?

Well, if you listen along, you’re about to find out.

*

Ann Quin—originally published in the 1960s and early 1970s, then again in 2001-2003, and now in 2018-2022—is the subject of the next season of the Two Month Review. We’re going to include��a record-setting��five��books in this season: , , , , . All are available from , , hopefully your local indie, Amazon.com, most libraries, the Dark Web, etc.

Not sold? Here are the opening lines from her novels:

A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father. . . .

[. . .]

A man fell to his death from a sixth-floor window of Peskett House, an office-block in Sellway Square today.

He was a messenger employed by a soap manufacturing firm.

[. . .]

Not that I’ve dismissed the possibility my brother is dead.

[. . .]

I have many names. Many faces.

So many men dying!!!! How can you��not��want to buy and read all these?

*

Well, if you’re��still��not sold, here’s a bit from Dutton’s��New Yorker��piece specifically about��Tripticks:

Tripticks��chronicles a nameless narrator’s exploits as he drives across America pursuing his “No. 1 X-wife and her schoolboy gigolo”—or else the ex and her lover are pursuing him. Let’s just say that they’re following each other, perpetually, in Buicks and Chevrolets, back and forth across a dystopian U.S.A. The America that we find in Quin’s novel is a place of rampant consumerism, religious hypocrisy, gory violence, and New Age self-help bullshit. It’s also sex-mad, drug-addled, racist, and riddled with the language of advertising clichés. When we do glimpse the natural environment out a car or motel window, it is often almost terrifyingly beautiful, a not quite surreal prehistoric vastness of mesas and rock formations, “sheer walls of symmetrical blue grey basaltic columns” and “salt pools with crystals forming on their surfaces” and “bare broken peaks.” But any romance of the American West is always immediately cut through, chopped down, and pressed up against something else, like “6 packs of fridged beer” and a “U-Drive Inn,” or a “lead-filled baseball bat” and a “hanging tree.” Of course, the setting of any novel, no matter how experimental, is made out of nothing but words, but that truism feels somehow truer of “Tripticks.” Language is the landscape that we’re traversing in this book, a shifting vista of TV commercials, political rhetoric, sexual fantasy, and sand dunes. Language is what’s happening��in here.

*

In addition to��Re: Quin, Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940–1980 by Francis Booth, a scholarly book that’s a who’s who of great mid-century writers, includes a significant piece on Quin and all of her works, and, thanks to the efforts of the And Other Stories, there’s a solid number of recent academic pieces and reviews of her books for us to consider throughout the course of the season. Which, I truly believe, is going to be so fun.

As in the past, we’ll be releasing special interviews first on for subscribers (no, this venture isn’t funded, and exists mostly because of my unwillingness to let it die, so please, a couple bucks a month?) and in the podcasts the following Friday. If you want to watch us LIVE AND UNEDITED tune into our on the days below. And follow TMR on Twitter for more specifics and random stuff.

Let’s blow apart the male narrative model together!

Introduction

Berg (pgs. 1-82)

November 9; Berg (pgs. 83-END)

November 16: Three�� (pgs. 1-75)

November 23: Three (pgs. 76-END)

November 30: Passages (pgs. 1-56)

December 7: Passages (pgs. 57-END)

December 14: Tripticks (pgs. 1-103)

December 21: Tripticks (pgs. 104-END)

December 28: Unmapped Country (ALL)

, and get ready! And if you like what we’ve done in the past, please consider supporting us through our .

If you’re a Patreon supporter at the $10 or higher level, you’ll be able to vote on the book for season 18, so sign up today!

This week’s music is “” by Los Campesinos!

You can watch all previous seasons of TMR on our .

Follow������and����for random thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

Be sure to order Brian’s book,��, which is available at better bookstores everywhere thanks to BOA Editions. And all of Katie’s translations, especially����,��and her forthcoming��

The associated with this post is copyrighted by .

This week’s music is “Simulation Swarm” by Big Thief.

If you like what you hear, review, rate, and support us on

You can watch next week’s episode (June 22nd, 9am ET) which will cover through page 136 in Never Did the Fire and page 152 in Catching Fire live on YouTube , and watch all previous seasons on our��.

Follow������and����for random thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

Be sure to order Brian’s book,��, which is available at better bookstores everywhere thanks to BOA Editions. And all of Katie’s translations, especially����,��and her forthcoming��

The associated with this post is copyrighted by .

This week’s music is “Monday” by The Regrettes.

If you like what you hear, review, rate, and support us on

You can watch next week’s episode (June 1st) live on YouTube , and watch all previous seasons on our��.

Follow������and����for random thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

Be sure to order Brian’s book,��, which is available at better bookstores everywhere thanks to BOA Editions. And all of Katie’s translations, especially����,��and her forthcoming��

Katie, Brian, and Chad will be back live on May 25th to cover up to page 68 in��Never Did the Fire��and to page 78 in��Catching Fire.

This week’s music is “No Blade of Grass” from the new(ish) Bodega album.

If you like what you hear, review, rate, and support us on

Follow������and����for random thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

Be sure to order Brian’s book,��, which is available at better bookstores everywhere thanks to BOA Editions. And all of Katie’s translations, especially����,��and her forthcoming��