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6:30 AM: THE OFFICIAL AWAKENING

The morning it happened was like any on the livestream. The maids in their red dresses and white aprons entered the inner chamber of the château at seven o’clock sharp. They performed their duties with the ticking movements of a cuckoo clock, and their heels clacked against the floor like the changing of the guard. They dusted the furniture and polished its handles. They fluffed the pillows and swept the floors. They reduced the tint of the skylight and removed the red crepe from the chandeliers and candelabras. Then, with all the solemn air expected of their duty, they stepped forward and opened the drapes on the four-poster bed.

The president’s penis sat up against the pillows and stretched its head side to side, filled with the morning pulse of the nation.

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Lincoln Memorial at sunrise in Washington, D.C., lucky-photographer on iStock

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In The Gift, which Margaret Atwood succinctly summarizes as a “classic study of gift giving and its relationship to art,” Lewis Hyde describes the principles of gifts, primarily that the gift must transfer, and “the feeling that if a gift is not treated as such, if one form of property is converted into another, something horrible will happen.” Aimee Bender’s “The Red Ribbon” is that what-if story—quiet, subtle, horrific, and sad—a cautionary tale about what happens when you treat a relationship as an economy and trade the gifts of love for the tit-for-tat of commodity exchange.

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“The Red Ribbon” by Aimee Bender, Electric Literature Single Sentence Animation

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“I want it darker,” Sarah said one day after Caleb left the room. “I want it to look like my soul.”

It was too operatic, she knew, but it was what she wanted. She wanted the darkness and nothingness wrapped around her like her childhood bedroom when she’d had migraines, the sun-blocking curtains drawn, the door closed, her head under the blanket. She wanted a darkness entire and complete, like the dark in a cave when you turn off your headlamp and listen to the drip of the water slowly enlarging the stalagmites and stalactites with the minerals left behind. She wanted a darkness you could feel, that you could reach out and stroke like silk. When she was in it, cage locked and senses nulled, she felt a total and pervasive calm.

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Ihor Dudnyk, “The Box Man” (2019)

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Ted Chiang’s new book, Exhalation (Knopf), is a story collection that dwells on ruminative, universal, what-it-means-to-be-human questions and ideas. In one tale, the users of a time travel gate learn that their fates cannot be changed. In another, a device that always displays a light before you press its button renders people unable to speak or move due to the concrete demonstration that there is no free will. The collection continues the intellectual thought and emotional work of Chiang’s earlier collection, Arrival (née Stories of Your Life and Others before the movie), in which the main character in the title story learns an alien language that reveals her bittersweet, inexorable future. So, naturally, the story I have chosen to write about is the one narrated by a parrot.

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Allora & Calzadilla, The Great Silence, in collaboration with Ted Chiang.

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Mitchell: Outside of something that is fictional but does not have a plot or main characters, what do you consider a fiction? And what makes a compelling one?

Fried: A fiction is great in that in can be absolutely anything. But that’s also the scary thing about trying to write one as opposed to a story. One of the weirdest paradoxes of creative work is that constraints tend to be more fun than total freedom.

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Despite the poverty and divorce and dead elephants and murder clowns, the America portrayed here is not a simple, nasty, broken place. It’s a land where there’s still the surprisingly optimistic possibility of arriving at unity and light.

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1949 Night at the Circus- Nina Leen

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The only thing that has defined me as a writer for a long while now is the fact that I show up at my desk, which I realize should be enough, but somehow it isn’t, and sometimes I fantasize about how nice it might be to stop caring, to ease into Pokémon Go and the clickable comforts of my Netflix queue.

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this is happening!

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Benjamin Percy is on a quest for membership in the Horror Pantheon, the right to throw back drinks with Straub and King and Rice at the Mountains of Madness. Even when writing literary short stories, Percy skirted horror’s territory, but with each of his novels he’s pushed farther into the realm of genre, that promised land of gun-milk and bloodshed-honey.

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Tim Hecker & Daniel Lopatin - Ritual For Consumption

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“’The time has come,’ the Walrus said, / ‘To talk of many things: / Of shoes—and ships—and sealing wax— / Of cabbages—and kings— / And why the sea is boiling hot— / And whether pigs have wings.’” So my pre-algebra teacher would begin when it came time to change our seating chart, to scramble his fifty-minute portion of our lives and throw our partner-work alliances into disarray. It was an appropriate deployment of Lewis Carroll: ridiculous but meaningful, wickedly playful and ritualistically attention-grabbing, and totally, completely nonsensical. William Todd Seabrook’s latest book, The Imagination of Lewis Carroll, handles the man, his mind, and his work in a similarly suitable manner.

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Alice in Wonderland (1951)