From the Editor…

The thirteenth issue of Socrates on the Beach contains excerpts from two forthcoming novels. Lisa Robertson’s vibrant Riverwork features a narrator questing after aesthetic and political issues in the work of Jean Genet and Poussin, while Devyn Defoe’s sly Burnside plunges one into a California community with Pynchonian wit and absurdity. Sean Hooks’s powerful long story of a painter’s latter days is full of piss and vinegar in its bitter-rooted depictions of age and the memories that caboose it. The fiction side finishes out with two glittering examples of the thorny and funny. Gabriel Blackwell’s six fictions abound in mordant humor in a world that can’t be satirized. Selen Ozturk’s work takes the ennobled Raymond Carver story and drowns it in a saucier stew of fomenting humanity undone by end times.

Three essays round out the issue. Patrick Autréaux returns with a lyrical interlude on Jean Genet’s work and soul. Bennett Sims’s essay gives a valuable close-reading of his own indelible stories and the authors he built upon, from Sebald to Charlotte Perkins Gilman to Cortázar. Finally, Carlos Rossmann de Leverkühn y Lucientes casts a great Gassian perspective on the questions of the Baroque novel and Bolano’s 2666 in particular.

Certain spellings from across the ocean have been retained. Thank you for visiting.

Best,

Greg Gerke