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We really don’t want you to un-friend us. That’s why we’re a freemium site and don’t have a paywall. DSM aims for the top of online publishing, the present and future of our industry. Unless Katie Price kills it. She and the celebs that is. A doctor gave her her assets — those of the zombie bank variety, that is — and said doctor just might write a book about it. Plenty of his colleagues are. Louis Armstrong embraced those of all races and faiths, probably Koestler too. And remember, we may tweet, but we’re not full of sheet. — Andrew Geer

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All About Lulu

Reading Jonathan Evison’s novel, All About Lulu, you’ll swoon over his gorgeously crafted endings and beginnings. You’ll re-experience the romantic velocity of being a teenager and grow to understand — in a comforting and disturbing way — even the most complicated of family relationships. You’ll also learn a thing or two about powerlifting and hot dogs. I know, you’re already buying the book online, right? I thought so, that’s why I added the link right here: All About Lulu from Soft Skull Press. Recently we caught up with Evison. Read our interview with him after the jump. — Lori Huskey

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II: ABYSMS

II.I (JANUARY MMIX)

“There is something else howling alongside us…not closely, distant…”

II.II (JANUARY MMIX)

With the same mechanical tread that drives waves into shore the morning delineates itself upon my throat, the sky paralyzed therein. I trace comfort in the din of horses as rabidly they eat from cavities torn open in my chest. What brings them such distances to pasture? The day falls useless and arid, the sheets that I pull to my face stinking of gypsum. Yes, but what brings them such distances to pasture? She watches over me, her mouth fixed at an angle of roughly twenty degrees. To explore that wilderness with my fingers would be like touching upon the event horizon of a black hole; time as I understand it would no longer hold sway and eventually the pull of the terrain would simply tear me limb from limb. Yes, yes, yes, that is all well and good, but what exactly brings them such distances to pasture? I may never know.

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The Gift of Translation

Translating a great literary work is an exhausting process. We haven’t gone through the process, but we can imagine. The translator is an ambassador, a die hard enthusiast who brings to a wider audience the words of a foreign speaking writer. More than that, the translator has a supremely intimate relationship with the author. Spending so much time with the words, cadence and insinuations of another person’s language marks a strange and awesome experience. To elaborate, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky share with the Wall Street Journal the fruits that translation bears. Jacket Copy interviews Marcel Theroux about writing a novel that describes a very cold, very distant place, a Brown professor of poetry is chasing down the National Book Award, and John Banville weighs in on the current Nabokov discussion. Elsewhere, Seed Magazine debates whether evolution makes people altruistic or selfish, The Millions considers the masters of the short story, and Robert McKee gets his treatment in The Rumpus, which, in this case, can be translated a couple of different ways. — Kevin Murphy

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I: VORTICES

I.I (SEPTEMBER MMVIII)

The smell of damp crevices mingles with that of decaying vegetable matter, paint stripper, urine, sour dish rags, burnt fuses, cough syrup, faulty drainage systems and vase water partly to repel the olfactory senses and partly to attract them. I draw breath in her shadow and pray the din will not awaken the reptiles which nest silently in her pubic mound, greased with saliva and the sap of plants dissected under a red Sabbath moon. The universe contracts as if it were steel cooling in a fractured cyst. ‘So vast is the quantity of moisture held within the sky,’ I hasten to remind myself, ‘that if not for it being contained by the troposphere it might crush one like a tidal wave.’ I mention nothing of this to her, of course, for an ulcerated mouth is easily dismantled.

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