From the Editor…

The eighth issue of Socrates on the Beach is fiction-heavy with a number of vibrant pieces from today’s most uncanny writers, as well as the charm of one old master. Garielle Lutz returns with a fiction that defies encapsulation—there is a sentence and then another, they grow out of each other, welcomingly intruding on our hearts and funny bones. Roderick Moody-Corbett’s “Which Might Contain Such Liquors As They Often Buried” is a stunning story set in Alberta full of rich descriptions, lyrical monuments to ruination, and pathos. In Alex Cocotas’s satirical “Introduction to ‘Me Watching You Watching Me,’” our porn-happy culture is transmitted through the meat grinder of a quasi-German Romantic essay. Finally, there is an excerpt from Paul Valéry’s one novel, Monsieur Teste, exquisitely translated by Charlotte Mandell, where, in sentences seemingly anticipating those of our century, we meet the arch cynic of the title.

On the non-fiction end, Gabriel Blackwell’s four short essays push pathos to a breaking point, pouring over our wonderful/unwonderful world of tech, violence, and miscommunication, while Xiao Yue Shan's “I Have Seen My Country in the Most Outside of Places” views the parallels between Italy and China in a wonderful meditation on the writing life. 

Certain spellings from across borders have been retained.

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

Greg Gerke