Midway through my month of guest editorship here at WFR, with the summer solstice on the horizon, I thought I’d do a quick stock-taking. We’ve seen a mix of translations, original fiction, and nonfiction articles so far. I’ve been posting every other day, but this last week the content has ramped up in frequency and will stay at fever […]
Swim into my mouth and I will tell you who you are. Have I said this part before? It’s impossible for either of us to know for sure; I can’t recall, and you’re certainly in no position to answer. The same forgetful straits that washed you down here confine utterance to the randomly spurting intervals between your death […]
Nadine Monfils was born in Etterbeek, Belgium in 1953. A novelist, short story writer, film director and producer, for many years she taught screenwriting at the Université Européenne d’Ecriture in Brussels and in prisons throughout France. As a journalist and film critic, she has been a regular contributor to Père Ubu, Focus, and Tels Quels. Her first book of stories, Laura […]
EDITOR’S NOTE: We are thrilled to present Kelly Link’s weird and wonderful short story “Lull,” with special permission by the author. “Lull” copyright ©2002 was first published in Conjunctions 39 and reprinted in Kelly Link’s Magic For Beginners (Random House, 2014). There was a lull in the conversation. We were down in the basement, sitting […]
To Maurice Spronck Spadones! They were crouching on slabs of rock, with knees held together, and rubbing the toes of their slippers with silver handled canes. Their saffron colored robes spread out around them, and an odor of cinnamon wafted from their skin. They reclined like this, sweating among the sauna boys, men dressed […]
Marcel Schwob (1867−1905) was a French symbolist author, remembered for his numerous and varied short stories, literary monographs, newspaper chronicles of fin-de-siècle Paris, and linguistic tracts on medieval slang, much of which sprang from his fabled devotion to archival research. While his work has fallen into relative obscurity, it was hailed in his day by writers […]
I confess I know little, and almost all of it circumstantial, about this atmospheric sketch of a gutter-dwelling worm. It was written by André Bay (1916−2013), for more than four decades a senior editor at Éditions Stock. Among the diverse writers he championed there were Jorge Amado, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Joyce Carol Oates, Thomas Wolfe, Anaïs Nin, and Virginia Woolf. His […]
Night travelers step from the train. I’m freezing. Footsteps hammer the street, shaking white droplets loose. The gutters are streaming. Mice are nibbling on cobwebs. Cows moo in the mist. Everywhere, without speaking a word, they fear the Queen of Spades. She is a woman, a monster, some claim; others maintain she is a gigantic insect; the truth is […]
Anne-Sylvie Salzman is a French writer and the co-editor of the magazine Le visage vert. As a translator, her many authors include Kris Saknussemm, Lord Dunsany, Fritz Leiber, Arthur Machen, Arthur Conan Doyle, Wilkie Collins, Sax Rohmer, Iain M. Banks, Jim Shepard, Robert Crais, L. Frank Baum, Herman Melville, Henry Darger, and Willa Cather. Prior publications in […]
With the publication of Cyclonopedia, Reza Negarestani catapulted to the forefront of the most interesting uncanny writers of the twenty-first century. Given that his work partakes heavily of nonfiction forms and of philosophical approaches to The Weird, even though also quite visceral, Negarestani may not be to everyone’s taste. But he is clearly the most […]