From the Editor…

The third issue of Socrates on the Beach is more fiction-based, but this is not to slight the two wonderful essays. Christina Tudor-Sideri’s Against the Skin is a bewitching, dense, lyrically sweet essay detailing a journey, with ruminations on words and many literary figures, while Sean Hooks’s piece on A.S. Byatt’s Possession and Terrence Malick’s films adeptly weaves those two artistic enterprises together, presenting a passionate stirring view on the wonderment of art.

On the fiction side, there are three works of fiction that are the funniest things I’ve come upon in my time away from Stanley Elkin, William Gaddis, Garielle Lutz, and Gilbert Sorrentino. Alex Cocotas’s fiction about an early relationship brunch date gone awry picks apart the little furious gremlins in our heads with tragicomic verve, while David Nutt’s story about the misadventures of a motley crew in the strung-out U.S.A. pierces with round after round of brilliant dialogue. Completing the triad is Angelo Hernandez-Sias’s “Heart Reacts,” a souped-up story showing and telling of our vaudevillian device-addled existence.

In a different vein there are Pamela Ryder’s exquisite, stark, and vivid sections from her novel The Lists of Billy the Kid, as well as a section of Gabriel Blackwell’s Doom Town, a harrowing portrait of being on the brink in an out-of-control country.

Thank you for visiting. I hope you will enjoy these works.

Greg Gerke