Wake Island Broadcast

Christopher Zeischegg is a writer and filmmaker who spent eight years working in the adult industry as performer, Danny Wylde. He is the author of The Magician, Body to Job, The Wolves that Live in Skin and Space, and Come to My Brother.  His latest book CREATION spans a decade's worth of writing on art, violence, sex work, and friendship. Acclaimed author, Christopher Zeischegg, confronts his past narratives, cruelty in auto-fiction, pornographic ambivalence, and transformative relationship to artist, Luka Fisher. "Creation is a stunning new collection by one of the most exciting living writers. Reading a Christopher Zeischegg book is like stepping into a dream in which anything can happen—his particular combination of sex, death, beauty, and horror often feels downright transcendent." —Chelsea Hodson, author of Tonight I'm Someone Else Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius SOCIALS: Twitter: @WakeIslandPod  Instagram: @wakeislandpod  David Leo Rice: www.raviddice.com Chris's Twitter: @chriszeischegg Chris's Instagram: @chriszeischegg David's Twitter: @raviddice --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/wake-island/support

Last year, David Peak released "The World Below," a midwestern gothic tale intertwining two rival families whose animosity sparks amidst a ritualistic occult murder mystery, amplified by heroic doses of LSD. Published by Apocalypse Party, a rapidly acclaimed purveyor of top-tier horror, "The World Below" is a testament to their commitment to darkness. This book seamlessly blends atmosphere and narrative, achieving the rare feat of being both immersive and a page-turner. David Peak's work aligns him with horror luminaries like Brian Evenson, Clive Barker, and Poppy Z Brite. In this episode, we delve into reading as a psychedelic act, exploring how family feuds in small towns can evolve into an art form. We also dissect the drama and artistry of Jerry Springer, touch on the American mythology surrounding the West Memphis Three, and revel in the exhilaration of death metal and films like "Mandy." "A brilliant and flayed slice of Midwest gothic. While one might find traces of Poppy Z. Brite or Michael McDowell here, The World Below is wholly its own beast. Peak laces the classic premise of feuding, cursed families with high-potency LSD, forming something fresh, potent, and filled with ache." -B.R. Yeager, author of Negative Space "Violent, noir-soaked horror infuses every page of David Peak's astonishing The World Below, coiling like a serpent around love: first and lost loves, love of family and the land, love of darkness and blood. Peak mixes the most primal of emotions like an alchemist, leaving every reader transformed." -Livia Llewellyn, author of Furnace SOCIAL: Twitter: @WakeIslandPod  Instagram: @wakeislandpod David's Twitter: @raviddice --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/wake-island/support

Every city has that motel. The motel on the edge of town, the mythical place you dare not go. Logan Berry goes there. In this episode, we calibrate a magical framework for understanding the world through a seance Logan conducted at the Skylark Motel. We get into cutting off spectral appendages, invoking chaos, exploring hoarder homes, practicing automatic writing, and Ultratheater.   Additionally, we discuss if relentless exposure to depravity makes us evil, and why occult commerce lacks the courage of its own convictions. We also explore the possibility that these are the best times, or at least the only times we'll ever live in Logan Berry is the author of Casket Flare (Inside the Castle), Run-off Sugar Crystal Lake (11:11 Press), and Transmissions to Artaud (Selffuck). He's a playwright and theatre director. He lives in Chicago. Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius SOCIAL: David's site: raviddice.com Wake Island Twitter: @WakeIslandPod  Wake Island Instagram: @wakeislandpod David's Twitter: @raviddice Logan's Twitter: @lgnbrry --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/wake-island/support

“The omnicidal will to constitute an infinite decision implies one of two things: either to kill the unfinished, or to let the unfinished kill.” In the second part of our conversation with Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh, we delve deep into the realm of unreality. We explore topics such as the labor associated with maintaining the criminal enterprise of the dream, the suffering and expenditure associated with visionary figures like Joyce Monsuer, the allure of totalitarian seduction during times marked by the predatory and sadistic behavior of those in authority, the phenomenon of NPC culture and the detachment /neutrality it brings, the banality of repressed nerds and the enduring shittiness of the metaverse.  Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh⁠ is a philosopher, literary theorist, and professor of comparative literature at Babson College. His work tracks currents of experimental thought across the so-called East and the West, with particular attention to concepts of chaos, violence, illusion, silence, extremism, mania, disappearance, night, evil, secrecy, and apocalyptic writing. He has published nine books to date, including: ⁠⁠⁠Night: A Philosophy of the After-Dark⁠⁠⁠ & ⁠⁠⁠Night: A Philosophy of the Last World⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠Omnicide: Mania, Fatality, and the Future-in-Delirium⁠⁠⁠ & ⁠⁠⁠Omnicide II: Mania, Doom, and the Future-in-Deception⁠⁠⁠, The Chaotic Imagination (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Inflictions (Continuum, 2012); The Radical Unspoken (Routledge, 2013); Insurgent, Poet, Mystic, Sectarian (SUNY, 2015); He is also the founding director of the Future Studies Program (www.futurestudiesprogram.com), Programmer of Transdisciplinary Studies for the New Centre for Research & Practice, and co-editor of the "Futures Theory" and "Suspensions" book series (Bloomsbury). Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius SOCIAL: David's site: raviddice.com Wake Island Twitter: @WakeIslandPod  Wake Island Instagram: @wakeislandpod David's Twitter: @raviddice --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/wake-island/support

"Every storyteller harbours a secret desire to be the one who tells the last story, just as every maniac wishes to inscribe the last fateful madness on earth." In this episode with Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh we walk with vertigo to summon the authors who play at the borders of insanity and intoxication. We get into the territories of the night and mania, both of which are the premise of Jason's most recent books: Night: A Philosophy of the After-Dark & Night: A Philosophy of the Last World and Omnicide: Mania, Fatality, and the Future-in-Delirium & Omnicide II: Mania, Doom, and the Future-in-Deception. Topics discussed include: exploring the dark poetics of the avant-garde, forbidden literature, and the final words of poets that lean into the dark and speak in apocalyptic tones, manic obsession, cosmic intoxication, opium dreams, mania redeeming nihilism, standing on the threshold of the abyss, embracing relentlessness as an aesthetic to achieve undeniability, and shunning sanity in favor of embracing madness. Omnicide is “A captivating fractal of conceptual prisms in half-storytelling, half-theoretical prose, a rhythmic, poetic, insidious work that commands submission, Omnicide absorbs the reader into unfamiliar and estranging landscapes whose every subtle euphoric aspect threatens to become an irresistible invitation to the end of all things.” Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh's Omnicide offers readers a view into a unique philosophy of delirium, mania, and vitalist annihilation: the startling revelation that everything that is, should not be. Omnicide is a singular kind of taxonomy, a teratology of thought-creatures that dovetails around his chosen writers, from the revelatory self-abnegation of Forugh Farrokhzad to Sadeq Hedayat, the poète maudite of modern Iran. These and other “poets of the lost cause” come together in a compelling book that is a strange hybrid of Aristotle's Categories, Borges's Book of Imaginary Beings, and the Necronomicon. ―Eugene Thacker, author of Infinite Resignation and In the Dust of This Planet Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh is a philosopher, literary theorist, and professor of comparative literature at Babson College. His work tracks currents of experimental thought across the so-called East and the West, with particular attention to concepts of chaos, violence, illusion, silence, extremism, mania, disappearance, night, evil, secrecy, and apocalyptic writing. He has published nine books to date, including: The Chaotic Imagination (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Inflictions (Continuum, 2012); The Radical Unspoken (Routledge, 2013); Insurgent, Poet, Mystic, Sectarian (SUNY, 2015); Omnicide: Mania, Fatality, and the Future-In-Delirium (MIT/ Urbanomic/ Sequence, 2019); and, Night: A Philosophy of the After-Dark (Zero Books, 2019); Omnicide II: Mania, Doom, and the Future-In-Deception (MIT/Urbanomic/Sequence, 2022); and Night II: A Philosophy of the Last World (Zero Books, 2022). He is also the founding director of the Future Studies Program (www.futurestudiesprogram.com), Programmer of Transdisciplinary Studies for the New Centre for Research & Practice, and co-editor of the "Futures Theory" and "Suspensions" book series (Bloomsbury). --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/wake-island/support

Enter the Amity-verse with Wake Island. In this episode we get into channeling dark energy from the media vortex surrounding America's most infamous haunted house in Amityville, Long Island. In addition we also talk about: Hauntings as a manifestation of trauma, the mythology-making behind the nearly 50-year Amityville horror house phenomenon, demonic media spectacles, the allure and menace of the suburbs, and the reality and fantasy of demonic possession. Jack Riccobono's new series, Amityville: An Origin Story, is now streaming on MGM+. Riccobono has written & directed a wide range of narrative, documentary and commercial work across the five boroughs of his native New York City and around the world, from Moscow to Shanghai to Freetown, often exploring hidden subcultures and the complexities of the human soul. His critically acclaimed feature documentary The Seventh Fire, from executive producers Terrence Malick, Natalie Portman and Chris Eyre, premiered at the Berlin Film Festival and received a New York Times Critic's Pick. SOCIAL: Jack's site: All Rites Reserved David's site: raviddice.com Wake Island Twitter: @WakeIslandPod  Wake Island Instagram: @wakeislandpod David's Twitter: @raviddice --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/wake-island/support

Welcome to the final episode of Wake Island! Bruce Wagner is on the show. BRUCE WAGNER is a novelist and screenwriter known for his apocalyptic yet spiritual view of humanity as seen through the lens of Hollywood. His books include: Force Majeure, Dead Stars, I'm Losing You, Wild Palms (graphic novel), I'll Let You Go, Still Holding, The Chrysanthemum Palace, Memorial, The Empty Chair, I Met Someone, A Guide For Murdered Children (writing as Sarah Sparrow), and ROAR: American Master - The Oral Biography of Roger Orr. Bruce was a co writer on A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987). David Cronenberg adapted his screenplay into the movie Map to the Stars, starring Julianne Moore, John Cusack, and Robert Pattinson. Wagner and Oliver Stone co-executive produced Wild Palms, the mini-series Wagner created, based on a comic strip that he wrote for Details magazine. Wild Palms aired on ABC in 1993. Wagner signed a book deal with Counterpoint Press in 2019 for his novel The Marvel Universe: Origin Stories. When he turned in the manuscript, Wagner said that the editor and publisher told him "the language is problematic." One of their objections was to the word "fat" - a 500-lb. character in the novel playfully calls herself "The Fat Joan" (an homage to the popular social media personality "The Fat Jew") - and stated that "not even a character can call herself that." The writer Sam Wasson wrote about the book's journey in Graydon Carter's digital magazine AirMail ("Bruce Wagner's Woke Universe"), suspecting that Wagner's editor had been cautioned by "sensitivity readers." In the same article, Wasson quotes Wagner as saying, "My entire body of work would be thrown into a furnace if it were to be read and judged by sensitivity readers." On October 13, 2020, Wagner decided that rather than look for another publisher, he would release the novel for free, on brucewagner.la, and into the public domain. BLURBS: “He is a visionary posing as a farceur.” - Salman Rushdie “Wagner is a James Joyce whose Dublin is Hollywood.” David Cronenberg “Bruce Wagner's stories about Hollywood are the best I've read since F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nathanael West.” - Terry Southern “Wagner writes like a wizard. His prose writhes and coruscates.” - John Updike LINKS: You can download a free copy of the Marvel Universe here or buy a physical copy online at Amazon. Children of the New Flesh c/o 11:11. The New House c/o Whiskey Tit. SOCIAL: Twitter: @WakeIslandPod Instagram: @wakeislandpod David's Twitter: @raviddice --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support

Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World In this uncompromising essay, Jonathan Crary presents the obvious but unsayable reality: our ‘digital age' is synonymous with the disastrous terminal stage of global capitalism and its financialisation of social existence, mass impoverishment, ecocide, and military terror. Scorched Earth surveys the wrecking of a living world by the internet complex and its devastation of communities and their capacities for mutual support. This polemic by the author of 24/7 dismantles the presumption that social media could be an instrument of radical change and contends that the networks and platforms of transnational corporations are intrinsically incompatible with a habitable earth or with the human interdependence needed to build egalitarian post-capitalist forms of life. Jonathan Crary is Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia University and is a founding editor of Zone Books. His publications include Techniques of the Observer, Suspensions of Perception and 24/7. PRAISE: “At last a book about the urgency to find a way out from a system that has crossed a threshold of irreparability and toxicity. A book that is simultaneously desperate and refreshing.” – Franco “Bifo” Berardi “Following on 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, Jonathan Crary here confirms his position as our most ruthless critic of all that exists. With a hammer of critical theory, he smashes the golden calf around which our lives revolve: the very internet itself. His sentences come packed with urgent truths long felt but only now articulated with the force they deserve. His clear-sightedness is the gift of prophets.” – Andreas Malm SOCIAL: Twitter: @WakeIslandPod Instagram: @wakeislandpod David's Twitter: @raviddice --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support

Dr Megen de Bruin-Molé is a Lecturer in Digital Media Practice with the University of Southampton. She specialises in ‘monstrous' historical fiction, adaptation, and contemporary remix culture, and she is currently interested in the digital afterlives and appropriations of historical archives and ephemera. Her book Gothic Remixed: Monster Mashups and Frankenfictions in 21st-Century Culture (Bloomsbury 2020) examines remix culture through the lens of monster studies, and her co-edited collection Embodying Contagion: The Viropolitics of Horror and Desire in Contemporary Discourse (UWP/Open Access 2021) explores how the metaphors of outbreak narratives have infiltrated the way news media, policymakers and the general public view the real world and the people within it. Megen is also an editor of the Genealogy of the Posthuman, an Open Access initiative curated by the Critical Posthumanism Network. Read more about Megen's work on her blog: frankenfiction.com. In this conversation we get into: remix studies, Twilight, mashups, thinking about the public domain as both an unmarked grave but also a place of rebirth, The Secret Garden, China Miéville, which monsters will dominate the future zeitgeist, colonialism via steampunk, the tentacular, and our current undead state. Gothic Remixed offers a fresh and exciting new take on twenty-first century Gothic. It addresses texts across a range of media that have often been dismissed as parasitic or derivative and champions their significance while remaining alert to their ethical shortcomings. By showing how monstrosity becomes the animating principle of Gothic mashups, hybrid texts and 'Frankenfictions', the book sheds light on emerging forms of Gothic cultural production and provides a cohesive framework for reading the incohesive. De Bruin-Molé is working at the cutting edge of contemporary Gothic and her book will be indispensable for students and scholars with an interest in the field. Stitching together adaptation theory and remix studies with surgical precision, De Bruin-Molé has produced the first book on the modern monster mashup. Authoritative, insightful and immensely enjoyable, Gothic Remixed heralds the arrival of an exciting new voice to contemporary Gothic studies. SOCIAL: Twitter: @WakeIslandPod Instagram: @wakeislandpod David's Twitter: @raviddice Megen's Twitter: @MegenJM --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support

Jarett Kobek is a Turkish-American writer living in California. His novel I HATE THE INTERNET was an international bestseller, translated into nine languages, and published in twelve countries. His other books include: ATTA, Do Every Thing Wrong!: XXXTentacion Against the World, Only Americans Burn in Hell and The Future Won't Be Long. Motor Spirit: The Long Hunt for the Zodiac It's 1969. Evil lurks in California. From a Napa County hippie child murder to Haight Street gang bangs to methamphetamine psychosis to the killing of Sharon Tate. Here and now, in this place and this time, it's all gone wrong. And there's something else, too. How to Find Zodiac Dear Reader, This is not the Zodiac speaking. The one thing that I ask of you is this, please read this book. It is called How to Find Zodiac. Being that this book is about the Zodiac, it offers a new suspect. The theory is probably correct. At the moment the theory is unproven. But the idea is a bomb waiting to go massive. Can you see the flaws in the hunting method or will you just agree and say case closed. Either way one thing is true. Zodiac can never look and seem the same after you read this book. "A scruffy masterpiece of criminology. It seems to me that either Kobek's painstaking deductions are correct, or we must urgently revise the laws of probability." -Alan Moore, author of From Hell SOCIAL: Twitter: @WakeIslandPod Instagram: @wakeislandpod David's Twitter: @raviddice --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support

James Pogue is a journalist and essayist. His first book is called Chosen Country: A Rebellion in the West. James recently wrote an article for Vanity Fair called Inside the New Right and it's not only a great piece of journalism but it struck a cultural nerve. Not only did it go viral but it even got a shout out on Twitter from the likes of Jeff Bezos and Glenn Greenwald. In this conversation we discuss everything from MMA's connection to the right, to diagnosing what is happening at the margins of our flailing empire. We also get into: the Dillon Danis controversy, bro science/Rogan's appeal, being skeptical of liberalism, how the left loses dynamic & questioning men, constantly beating back the devils at the gate, alienation leading to chaos, the system spinning out of control, reading the tea leaves of history and seeing techno fascism, Curtis Yarvin as a historian analyst of the left, social revolution, the aesthetics of the new right, and cool kids adopting a religious pose. SOCIAL: Twitter: @WakeIslandPod Instagram: @wakeislandpod David's Twitter: @raviddice James Twitter: @jhensonpogue James Instagram: @jhensonpogue --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support

We talk about burning down the plantation and doomed lovers on the run. BUD SMITH works heavy construction and lives in Jersey City, NJ. He is the author of Teenager (Vintage, 2022), Double Bird (Maudlin House, 2018), Dust Bunny City (Disorder Press, 2017), among others. He is also a creative writing teacher and editor. In the intro, David and I talk about Gregg Araki's The Living End. The interview with Bud starts at 12:08. TEENAGER: Two teenagers, in love and insane, journey across the United States in this Bonnie and Clyde–like adventure, pursuing a warped American dream, where Elvis is still king and the corn dog is the “backbone of this great country.” PRAISE: “There is a typo on page 14. Other than that, this book is perfect.” —Bill Callahan “Teenager is a great artistic high-wire act and a gift to readers who still care about the timeless problem of young men and women finding their place together in this world—or not. Should Tella get in another stolen car with Kody and flee with him to the Montana of his imagination? Both quests are represented here, hers and his, Yin and Yang, and Smith tells it all with ecstatic wit and feeling and innocence. To have captured this duality on paper demanded more than wildness, more than heart—all of which Smith has to burn—but also will and skill and ingenuity.” —Atticus Lish, author of The War for Gloria SOCIAL: Twitter: @WakeIslandPod Instagram: @wakeislandpod David's Twitter: @raviddice Bud's Twitter: @Bud_Smith Bud's Instagram: @budsmith --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support

Lindsay Lerman is a writer and translator. Her new novel, WHAT ARE YOU (CLASH Books) is out now. Her first book I'm From Nowhere was published in 2019. Her essays, short stories, and poetry have been published in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Entropy, Hobart, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. She is currently adapting her short story Real Love—which first appeared in NY Tyrant Magazine—for the screen. She is represented by Abby Walters at CAA. In the intro David and I talk about Pascal Laugier's MARTYRS (2008). The interview with Lindsay starts at 27:42. In this conversation we get into: locating and living through the cusp of our time, the interconnection between nuance and chaos, dissolution, the unspoken rules of commodification, giving into the productivity of terror, giving yourself up to the universe, barfing into the void, celebrating the irrational, and the importance of play in the face of utility. We also talk about Bataille's philosophy around expenditure and waste as a way to explore Lindsey's outlook and work as an author. WHAT ARE YOU: Hypnotic, dreamlike, lyrical essays tell the story of a woman trapped in a destructive love affair with the universe. Her understanding of power, desire, and complicity must be transformed again and again. Addressed to an amorphous you, Lerman wrestles with the forces of birth and death, creation and destruction—going deep into the subterranean strata of consciousness and back. PRAISE: “An incantatory and hypnotic work of voice, What Are You exists at the apex of creation and destruction, desire and shame, innocence and experience, violence and tenderness, rapture and suffering, hunger and the denial of flesh. To read it is to feel the terror of falling from a great height—but wanting to; maybe even choosing to jump.” - SARAH GERARD, AUTHOR OF SUNSHINE STATE AND TRUE LOVE "Passionate, dispassionate, hypnotic, deadpan, ecstatic, Lindsay Lerman's What Are You, read it now. Now." - KATHE KOJA, AUTHOR OF THE CIPHER SOCIAL: Twitter: @WakeIslandPod Instagram: @wakeislandpod David's Twitter: @raviddice Lindsay's Twitter: @lindsaylerman Lindsay's Instagram: @lindsay.lerman --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support

Adam Lehrer is a writer and an artist living in New York. He is the founder and co-host of the System of Systems podcast, and the founder and curator of the Safety Propaganda collaborative media platform. Communions is Adam's debut book - out now from Hyperidean Press. Communions: Channeling hallucinated versions of dead artists and junkies, these fragments access the uncanny allure of shared experience. Elements of speculative fiction, criticism and encrypted auto-biography merge to form a disconcerting portrait of the artist as addict. Neither denunciation nor valorization, Communions is an attempt to probe the haunting singularity of opiate addiction and its ineradicable influence on art and culture. As a writer, Lehrer covers topics such as contemporary art, horror fiction, noise and experimental music, cinema, and left politics. David and I talk about the Truman Show in the intro. Interview starts at 19:25. Follow us on social at: Twitter: @WakeIslandPod Instagram: @wakeislandpod David's Twitter: @raviddice System of System Twitter: @SystemofSystem3 Safety Propaganda Twitter: @SafetyPropagan1 Safety Propaganda Instagram: @safetypropaganda Adam's Instagram: @adamlehreruptown --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support

In the intro we talk about Lynne Ramsay's Ratcatcher and animating atmosphere of the desolate landscape of Pennsylvania's coal region with author Meghan Lamb. Failure to Thrive (Apocalypse Party, 2022) follows the interconnected stories of three families as they navigate issues of disability, illness, and substance abuse in a former coal town: a landscape that is itself sick. A married couple argues over how to raise their neuroatypical child. A former nurse cares for her aging father, processing guilt over her addiction. A young man returns home after experiencing a traumatic brain injury, rediscovering a space where the past and present bleed uncannily together. Meanwhile, a two hundred-year mine fire burns beneath the town, a whispering dread that pervades the atmosphere. In addition to Failure to Thrive, Meghan Lamb is the author of All of Your Most Private Places (Spork Press, 2020) and Silk Flowers (Birds of Lace, 2017). She currently serves as the nonfiction editor of Nat. Brut, a Whiting Award-winning journal of art and literature dedicated to advancing inclusivity in all creative fields. “Bridging the gap between dirty realism of Diane Williams and the uncanny ambiance of Tarkovsky, Meghan Lamb's All of Your Most Private Places is an astonishing debut, one that immediately defines her as a force of expectation-bending, deep psyche fiction, culled from the most intimate, oft-suppressed depths of who we are.” — Blake Butler, author of Alice Knot “Failure to Thrive captures slow collapse like nothing else I've read. It is packed with heartbreakingly acute observation, and yet it is uncrowded and spacious, with a gauzy, hallucinatory quality. Both expansive and economical, it does more with the form of the novel than most books will ever attempt. It's a gem glittering in the dark.” —Lindsay Lerman, author of I'm From Nowhere “Meghan Lamb is such an exquisite, comprehensively intelligent, dreamy writer. Failure to Thrive exudes utmost pleasure and a defying ache from every dot of its ink, like the sun.” —Dennis Cooper, author of The Marbled Swarm Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius Follow us on social at: Twitter: @WakeIslandPod Instagram: @wakeislandpod David's Twitter: @raviddice Apocalypse Party's Twitter: @apocpartypress Meghan's Instagram: @lamb.like.the.animal & @significant_others_series --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support

Will American fantasies of purifying violence dissolve upon contact with reality or will the illusion break into civil war? Find out on this eps w/ ⁦Stephen Marche‬⁩ author of The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future We also get into: American wildness, bloodlust, foment, genius, and the apocalyptic longing for an endless frontier. The United States is coming to an end. The only question is how. No matter your political leaning, most of us can sense that America is barreling toward catastrophe—of one kind or another. Relevant and revelatory, The Next Civil War plainly breaks down the looming threats to America and is a must-read for anyone concerned about the future of its people, its land, and its government. “Should be required reading for anyone invested in preserving our 246-year experiment in self-government . . . The book alternates between fictional dispatches from a coming social breakdown and digressions that support its predictions with evidence from the present. The effect is twofold: The narrative delivers Cormac McCarthy-worthy drama; while the nonfictional asides imbue that drama with the authority of documentary.” —Ian Bassin, The New York Times Book Review Stephen Marche is a novelist, essayist and cultural commentator. He is the author of half a dozen books, including The Unmade Bed: The Messy Truth About Men and Women in the Twenty-First Century (2016) and The Hunger of the Wolf (2015). Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius Follow us on social at: Twitter: @WakeIslandPod Instagram: @wakeislandpod David's Twitter: @raviddice Stephen's Twitter: @StephenMarche --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support

We speak to Dr Dylan Mulvin, Assistant Professor in LSE Department of Media and Communications, about his book Proxies: The Cultural Work of Standing In, which examines the ways in which proxies shape our lives, the histories of their production and how we delegate power to represent our world. You can download a free copy of Proxies: The Cultural Work of Standing In at https://dylanmulvin.com/ In the intro David and I talk about Strange Days (1995) The interview with Dylan starts at 26:58 Visuals referenced: 29:01 -- NTSC color television test slides (Fink and NTSC 1955) 34:09 -- Vancouver as a non place (X-Files) 35:14 -- Indian-head test pattern 36:29 -- UK Test Signal 38:58 -- Cleaning the Kilogram 45:43 -- The Lena image 51:53 -- Yodaville 53:28 -- Middletown 1:08:44 Hito Steyerl, How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 2013 Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius Follow us on social at: Twitter: @WakeIslandPod Instagram: @wakeislandpod David's Twitter: @raviddice Dylan's Twitter: @dwmulvin --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support

JUSTIN KEENAN is a writer and narrative designer on Disco Elysium which is a groundbreaking open world role playing game. In it, you're a detective with a unique skill system at your disposal and a whole city block to carve your path across. Interrogate unforgettable characters, crack murders or take bribes. Become a hero or an absolute disaster of a human being.   In this episode we excavate the inner world at the heart of Disco Elysium and get into: Dark City (1998), RPGs, paranoia vs dread, world detectors, the future of video games, the state of noir detectives, and more... Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius       Follow us on social at:      Twitter: @WakeIslandPod   Instagram: @wakeislandpod   David's Twitter: @raviddice    --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support

In this episode with Jonathan Greenaway (Theology, Horror and Fiction: A Reading of the Gothic Nineteenth Century & The Horror Vanguard podcast) we arrive at the New Flesh while peeling back the layers of a nightmarish society in stasis. We get into: necro-neoliberalism, depressive hedonia, unspent energy mutating into a gothic maw, our struggle to be and remain human, nostalgia neutralizing hope/fear instead of bringing us closer to history, the internet as a profoundly haunted and haunting device, Paul tells a dumb story about seeing Beyond the Black Rainbow on acid and the glorious weirdness of "Titane" Jon Greenaway is an academic, writer and teacher based in the North of England. He's currently working on a PhD that focuses on philosophy, theology and the gothic literature of the nineteenth century. He's also behind @TheLitCritGuy, a social media project that aims to bring critical and cultural theory away from it's academic enclave and to the widest possible audience. He writes for a variety of publications online and blogs at thelitcritguy.com. He tweets @thelitcritguy. Find Jon on Youtube at Jon the Lit Crit Guy Theology, Horror and Fiction: A Reading of the Gothic Nineteenth Century Surpassing scholarly discourse surrounding the emergent secularism of the 19th century, Theology, Horror and Fiction argues that the Victorian Gothic is a genre fascinated with the immaterial. Through close readings of popular Gothic novels across the 19th century – Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Dracula and The Picture of Dorian Gray, among others – Jonathan Greenaway demonstrates that to understand and read Gothic novels is to be drawn into the discourses of theology. Despite the differences in time, place and context that informed the writers of these stories, the Gothic novel is irreducibly fascinated with religious and theological ideas, and this angle has been often overlooked in broader scholarly investigations into the intersections between literature and religion. Combining historical theological awareness with interventions into contemporary theology, particularly around imaginative apologetics and theology and the arts, Jonathan Greenaway offers the beginnings of a modern theology of the Gothic. Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius Follow us on social at: Twitter: @WakeIslandPod Instagram: @wakeislandpod David's Twitter: @raviddice --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support

Erik Davis, PhD, is an author, award-winning journalist, sometimes podcaster, and popular speaker based in San Francisco. He is the author of five books: High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the 70s; Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica; The Visionary State: A Journey through California's Spiritual Landscape, and the 33 1/3 volume Led Zeppelin IV. His first and best-known book remains TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information. Erik hosted the podcast Expanding Mind on the Progressive Radio Network for a decade, and earned his PhD in Religious Studies from Rice University in 2015. He currently writes the Substack publication Burning Shore. Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius Follow us on social at: Twitter: @WakeIslandPod Instagram: @wakeislandpod David's Twitter: @raviddice --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support

Derek McCormack is a small town pervert and the author of The Well-Dressed Wound and Castle F*ggot, both published by Semiotext(e). His most recent book is Judy Blame's Obituary. This collection brings together for the first time McCormack's fashion journalism. He writes about and interviews fashion figures that fascinate him, tracing the ways they inspire and inhabit his novels. The result is a sort of memoir in essays: as he writes, "My tribute to [Judy] Blame is about him and about me—there are lots of my own tales woven in with the topics I touch on. The writing here is a sort of autobiography, a life seen through a scrim, or a life as a scrim—my moire mémoire."  Judy Blame's Obituary contains twenty years' worth of reminiscences, reviews of fashion shows and books, interviews with writers about fashion, and interviews with fashion designers about writing. He talks to Nicolas Ghesquière about perfume, and to Edmund White about which perfume he wore as a young f*g in New York City. He inspects the clothes that Kathy Acker left behind when she died, and he summons the spirit of Margiela in a literary seance. He traces the history of sequins, then recounts the cursed story of Vera West, the costume designer who dressed the Bride of Frankenstein. These pieces were all previously published, some in Artforum, some in The Believer, and some in underground publications like Werewolf Express—what binds them together is a sense that though fashion victimizes us, this victimization is sometimes a sort of salvation.  In this Wake Island holiday special we talk about: my butthole, revealing the real Derek through writing about fashion, turning our ashes into jewelry, clothes as ectoplasm, Dodie Bellamy's “Kathy Forest,” Vivienne Westwood's imperial years, an outfit based on an advent calendar, sequins implantations, Margiela, being a small town pervert from Peterborough, our hometowns vs the hometowns of our minds, fistulas, Guy Maddin, the sadomasochistic beauty of being a writer, and we investigate - why does fashion abandon us?   Preorder Judy Blame's Obituary: Writings on Fashion and Death here.  Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius  Additional music by TRG Banks  Follow us on social at:  Twitter: @WakeIslandPod     Instagram: @wakeislandpod  David's Twitter: @raviddice  Derek's Twitter: @HillbillyBijoux  Derek's IG: @derek_mccormack --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support

Susan Sontag meets Hanif Abdurraqib in this fascinating exploration of the unexpected connections between how we consume images and the insidious nature of Fascism. Images come at us quickly, often without context. A photograph of Syrian children suffering in the wake of a chemical attack segues into a stranger's pristine Instagram selfie. Before we can react to either, a new meme induces a laugh and a share. While such constant give and take might seem innocent, even entertaining, this barrage of content numbs our ability to examine critically how the world, broken down into images, affects us. Images without context isolate us, turning everything we experience into mere transactions. It is exactly this alienation that leaves us vulnerable to fascism—a reactionary politics that is destroying not only our lives and our nations, but also the planet's very ability to sustain human civilization. Who gets to control the media we consume? Can we intervene, or at least mitigate the influence of constant content? Mixing personal anecdotes with historical and political criticism, Image Control explores art, social media, photography, and other visual mediums to understand how our culture and our actions are manipulated, all the while building toward the idea that if fascism emerges as aesthetics, then so too can anti-fascism. Learning how to ethically engage with the world around us is the first line of defense we have against the forces threatening to tear that world apart. Patrick Nathan is the author of Some Hell, published in February 2018 from Graywolf Press. He lives in Minneapolis. He also writes a monthly letter, which you can subscribe to here. Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius Follow us on social at: Twitter: @WakeIslandPod Instagram: @wakeislandpod Patrick's Twitter: @patricknathan David's Twitter: @raviddice --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support

Blake Butler is the author of seven book-length works, including Alice Knott (Riverhead), 300,000,000 (Harper Perennial), Sky Saw (Tyrant Books), There is No Year (Harper Perennial), Scorch Atlas (Featherproof Books), and Ever (Calamari Press), as well as the nonfictional Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia (Harper Perennial). He is a founding editor of HTMLGIANT We talk about: The Consumer by Michael Gira, insomnia, Penny's notebook from Inspector Gadget, horror, internet gods and demons, forbidden books, courting insane energy, transcendence, the enduring low cost appeal of text, childhood portals, points of no return, The Bachelor and Blake's relentless drive to write. Molly by Blake Butler “A mastermind and visionary.” —Ben Marcus “Our premier literary shaman.” —Alissa Nutting “[Butler's work is] wild but elegant and smart.” —Roxane Gay Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius Follow us on social at: Twitter: @WakeIslandPod Instagram: @wakeislandpod Blake's Twitter: @blakebutler David's Twitter: @raviddice --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support

Rosecrans Baldwin is the bestselling author of Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles. Other books include The Last Kid Left and Paris, I Love You but You're Bringing Me Down. His debut novel, You Lost Me There, was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice.  Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles is a provocative, exhilaratingly new understanding of the United States' most confounding metropolis—not just a great city, but a full-blown modern city-state. America is obsessed with Los Angeles. And America has been thinking about Los Angeles all wrong, for decades, on repeat. Los Angeles is not just the place where the American dream hits the Pacific. (It has its own dreams.) Not just the vanishing point of America's western drive. (It has its own compass.) Functionally, aesthetically, mythologically, even technologically, an independent territory, defined less by distinct borders than by an aura of autonomy and a sense of unfurling destiny—this is the city-state of Los Angeles.  Deeply reported and researched, provocatively argued, and eloquently written, Rosecrans Baldwin's Everything Now approaches the metropolis from unexpected angles, nimbly interleaving his own voice with a chorus of others, from canonical L.A. literature to everyday citizens. Here, Octavia E. Butler and Joan Didion are in conversation with activists and astronauts, vampires and veterans. Baldwin records the stories of countless Angelenos, discovering people both upended and reborn: by disasters natural and economic, following gospels of wealth or self-help or personal destiny. The result is a story of a kaleidoscopic, vibrant nation unto itself—vastly more than its many, many parts.  Baldwin's concept of the city-state allows us, finally, to grasp a place—Los Angeles—whose idiosyncrasies both magnify those of America, and are so fully its own. Here, space and time don't quite work the same as they do elsewhere, and contradictions are as stark as southern California's natural environment. Perhaps no better place exists to watch the United States's past, and its possible futures, play themselves out.  Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius  Follow us on social at:  Twitter: @WakeIslandPod    Instagram: @wakeislandpod --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support

Catherine Liu is the author of Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class. We get into the: dynamics of noir, the pseudo superiority and inchoate narcissism of neoliberalism, social dominance, corporate embodiment, the monetization of victimhood, our collective need for catharsis and the Met Gala. Professional Managerial Class (PMC) elite workers labor in a world of performative identity and virtue signaling, publicizing an ability to do ordinary things in fundamentally superior ways. Author Catherine Liu shows how the PMC stands in the way of social justice and economic redistribution by promoting meritocracy, philanthropy, and other self-serving operations to abet an individualist path to a better world. Virtue Hoarders is an unapologetically polemical call to reject making a virtue out of taste and consumption habits. "Virtue Hoarders amplifies a discussion that still needs to be had."—Spiked "Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class, argues that the professional-managerial class-working class alliance was doomed from the start for the simple reason that the two classes' interests are fundamentally opposed. "—The Washington Examiner Catherine Liu is professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is also the author of The American Idyll: Academic Anti-Elitism as Cultural Critique was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2011. She works on Critical Theory of the old fashioned kind and is engaged in a long term critique of Professional Managerial Class driven liberal politics. She has written an unpublished memoir called Panda Gifts. Catherine Liu is professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine. Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius Follow us on social at: Twitter: @WakeIslandPod Instagram: @wakeislandpod --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support

Patrick McGrath is the author of three collections of short fiction, including Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now, and ten novels, including Asylum, Dr. Haggards Disease, Port Mungo, and most recently Last Days in Cleaver Square. His work has been widely published in translation, and in Italy Asylum, titled Follia, has sold over half a million copies. His screenplay of his novel Spider was filmed by David Cronenberg and premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Patrick was born in London and grew up near Broadmoor Hospital where his father was Medical Superintendent. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support

Inside the Castle is a small press operated from Lawrence, Kansas by John Trefrey. Their books are unique from one another but share a vision, that literature is not representational but incantatory, that books are objects that exist much like other objects in your life and home, only they have additional dimensions, not dimensions separate or distant from the ones you occupy, but involuted dimensions that only become apparent when you reach out to them. _ Megan Jeanne Gette is an anthropology PhD student and fellow at UT Austin. She has an MFA in poetry from the University of Minnesota. Her research explores the role of the mineral in renewable energy transitions, sensory ethnography, and subterranean/energy imaginaries. She is a section editor for the Visual and New Media Review and co-creator of con-text-ure at Society for Cultural Anthropology's Fieldsights. In Majority Reef, there are 8 SURFACES. Eight surfaces can form an octahedron, which looks like two triangular prisms put together at their bases, which forms the interior of a sphere, such as the globe. Within each section is a lyric essayistic syntax of "recursive loops of longing" or an "infinite palimpsest of pain or desire," a variety of 8 tones--or perhaps a doubling of the 4 humors--that loop in a style I am calling Weeping Lemon Meringue, or echo-poetics, the ant-I- narcissus. _ Germán Sierra got his MD and PhD degrees at the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain) before doing postdoctoral research in Cognitive Neuroscience at the Brain Research Institute in UCLA. He currently works at the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology of the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain). As a writer, Germán Sierra is deeply interested in contemporary experimental fiction. He has been included among the “Mutantes” or “Afterpop writers”: a group of Spanish writers who are strongly committed with innovative literature. Most of his fictional work deals with metamediatics and the role of science and technology as cultural discourses in post-postmodern and posthuman societies. In the clever [dis]guise of fiction, what The Artifact in fact foists upon its readers (hoisting us up in so doing so that ultimately we can look down on the whole situation from a higher perspective—albeit only to crash like a bluebird into the window through which we bear witness) is a veritable Germáneutic: an intriguing interpretation and lucid elucidation of what it is (and is not) to be human in the era of big data, of computation beyond the bounds of human intellection, and—spiralling-off from the latter—of intelligent machines (indeed ‘A.I.') that can learn and discern far more than the human, perceiving—and who knows: conceiving?—in the vast void qua bind-spot of our own biological being. _ John Trefry is an architect and the author of the books Plats, Thy Decay Thou Seest By Thy Desire, and Apparitions of the Living. Current works-in-progress: Massive (a novel) & Inanimism (a nonfiction poem). More diminutive writings have appeared in various other outlets. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support

Matthew Specktor is the author of the novels American Dream Machine and That Summertime Sound; a nonfiction book, The Sting; and the forthcoming memoir The Golden Hour (Ecco/HarperCollins). He is a founding editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. In the intro David and I discuss Michelangelo Antonioni's haunting film The Passenger starring Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider. In the interview with Matthew we get into the essence of noir, the dream beyond impact, and the vampiric Lost Highway-esque energy of Los Angeles. We also delve into the psychic undercurrents of LA, the nature of portals, Michael Mann's Heat, Chinatown, and the complex, conflicting drives that compel us to create art. "A novelist and critic with a sharp eye for Hollywood blends memoir and cultural critique in this study of classic American failure narratives." ― The New York Times Book Review “The sweeping American Dream Machine by Matthew Specktor is . . . one of the best novels about Los Angeles I have ever read." — Bret Easton Ellis "A haunting memoir-in-criticism exploring a very certain kind of failure―the Hollywood story. Specktor intricately knits his own losses and nostalgias into a larger cultural narrative of writers and filmmakers whose failures left behind a ghostly glamour. I can't get it out of my mind." ― Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support

Kate Durbin is a visual artist, filmmaker, and writer from Los Angeles, California (USA), whose artworks are nervous, unnerving, and playful explorations of the human condition in a time of constant screens, globalism, and late capitalism. Her work draws on a wide-range of popular culture references: Disneyland, reality TV shows, fast food, horror movie characters, and Hello Kitty are just some of the recurring figures and references that populate her work. In Hoarders, her third book of poetry, Durbin deftly traces the associations between hoarding and collective US traumas rooted in consumerism and the environment. Each poem in the book is a prismatic portrait of a person and the beloved objects they hoard, from Barbies to snowglobes to vintage Las Vegas memorabilia to rotting fruit to plants. Using reality television as a medium, Durbin conjures an uncanny space of attachments that reflects a cultural moment back to the reader in ways that are surreal and tender and surprising.  Like Beckett or Kafka, in the absurdist tradition, Hoarders ultimately embraces with sympathy the difficulty and complexity of the human condition. Order Hoarders directly from Wave Books and enjoy 30% off by using the promo code WAKE_ISLAND --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support

Over the course of a five-decade career, Nares has investigated, challenged, and expanded the boundaries of her multi-media practice that encompasses film, music, painting, photography, and performance. She continues to employ various media to explore physicality, motion, and the unfolding of time. Nares has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and a career-spanning retrospective at the Milwaukee Art Museum in 2019. Her work is included in several prominent public collections, including the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. A career-spanning survey of her film and video works were presented in 2008 at Anthology Film Archives, New York; and in 2011 at IFC Center, New York. In 2014, Rizzoli published a comprehensive monograph on Nares's career to date. Nares has lived and worked in New York since 1974. She has been represented by Kasmin since 1991. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support

Dr. Finley is a Religious Studies Professor at Louisiana State University and has been studying African American religious thought, and spirituality. His research expands upon these themes with an emphasis on esotericism, non-material consciousness, African American embodiment and the role of the UFO narrative in the Nation of Islam. In this conversation we get into rethinking and restructuring how we conceive of America and its relation to African American spirituality and notions of transcendence. We also explore traumatic mysticism, African American UFO traditions and their relationship to the Nation of Islam, the origins of black embodiment, the irony of institutionalized diversity, blackness as a portal to the universal, Louis Farrakhan's encounter with the Mother Wheel, mystical experiences that transcend white supremacy and anti-blackness, black narratives being at the center of consciousness, the expansion of consciousness during an abduction experience, familiarity with the transcendent other, and transcendent blackness as a key locus of American religion and spirituality. Stephen Finley received his Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Rice University in 2009 shortly after joining the faculty at LSU in 2008. He has a joint appointment to the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies and the Program in African & African American Studies. Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius Follow Wake Island at: Twitter: @WakeIslandPod Instagram: @wakeislandpod Follow David at: Twitter: @raviddice Instagram: @raviddice --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support

Mikita Brottman is an author and psychoanalyst with particular interests in true crime, forensics, psychoanalysis, animals, abjection, and the unexplained. Her work blends memoir, history, psychoanalysis, and creative speculation. Currently, she is especially interested in reconsidering and interrogating the true crime genre. This interest is at the heart of her two most recent books, An Unexplained Death (Henry Holt, 2018), and Couple Found Slain (Henry Holt, 2021). COUPLE FOUND SLAIN: “In 1992, a young man named Brian Bechtold was judged “not criminally responsible” for the murder of his parents, a crime he had never tried to conceal. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, he was sent to a maximum security psychiatric hospital. Though the book does explore Brian's life before the killings, when he was abused, Brottman's real goal here is to shine a light on Brian's decades-long captivity.” Critically acclaimed author and psychoanalyst Mikita Brottman offers literary true crime writing at its best, taking us into the life of a murderer after his conviction―when most stories end but the defendant's life goes on. "Brottman has established herself as a leading voice in modern true crime. She finds empathy in the criminal and shows compassion for those whom society wishes to simply forget. This is not just a well-written book, it's an important book. A must-read." --James Renner, author of True Crime Addict Outro song is "Slum Creeper" by Calla off the Scavengers album -- follow Calla on IG for updates! Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius Follow us on social at: Twitter: @WakeIslandPod Instagram: @wakeislandpod --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support

Punch Me Up to the Gods is a poetic and raw coming-of-age memoir about Blackness, masculinity, and addiction. In the conversation we talk about seedy bars and public sex as well as rehab, representation and towards the end I tell a story about the first and possibly only time in my life where I clutched my pearls. We also get into a literary pilgrimage Brian went on and much more! Punch Me Up to the Gods introduces a powerful new talent in Brian Broome, whose early years growing up in Ohio as a dark-skinned Black boy harboring crushes on other boys propel forward this gorgeous, aching, and unforgettable debut. Brian's recounting of his experiences—in all their cringe-worthy, hilarious, and heartbreaking glory—reveal a perpetual outsider awkwardly squirming to find his way in. Indiscriminate sex and escalating drug use help to soothe his hurt, young psyche, usually to uproarious and devastating effect. A no-nonsense mother and broken father play crucial roles in our misfit's origin story. But it is Brian's voice in the retelling that shows the true depth of vulnerability for young Black boys that is often quietly near to bursting at the seams. “Punch Me Up to the Gods obliterates what we thought were the limitations of not just the American memoir, but the possibilities of the American paragraph. I'm not sure a book has ever had me sobbing, punching the air, dying of laughter, and needing to write as much as Brian Broome's staggering debut. This sh*t is special.” —Kiese Laymon, New York Times bestselling author of Heavy “Punch Me Up to the Gods is some of the finest writing I have ever encountered and one of the most electrifying, powerful, simply spectacular memoirs I—or you—have ever read. And you will read it; you must read it. It contains everything we all crave so deeply: truth, soul, brilliance, grace. It is a masterpiece of a memoir and Brian Broome should win the Pulitzer Prize for writing it. I am in absolute awe and you will be, too.” —Augusten Burroughs, New York Times bestselling author of Running with Scissors A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' PICK • A TODAY SUMMER READING LIST PICK • AN ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY BEST DEBUT OF SUMMER PICK • A PEOPLE BEST BOOK OF SUMMER PICK --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support

Despite her parents' struggles with addiction, Lilly Dancyger always thought of her childhood as a happy one. But what happens when a journalist interrogates her own rosy memories to reveal the instability around the edges? Dancyger's father, Joe Schactman, was part of the iconic 1980s East Village art scene. He created provocative sculptures out of found materials like animal bones, human hair, and broken glass, and brought his young daughter into his gritty, iconoclastic world. She idolized him--despite the escalating heroin addiction that sometimes overshadowed his creative passion. When Schactman died suddenly, just as Dancyger was entering adolescence, she went into her own self-destructive spiral, raging against a world that had taken her father away. As an adult, Dancyger began to question the mythology she'd created about her father--the brilliant artist, struck down in his prime. Using his sculptures, paintings, and prints as a guide, Dancyger sought out the characters from his world who could help her decode the language of her father's work to find the truth of who he really was. Lilly Dancyger is the author of Negative Space (2021), a reported and illustrated memoir selected by Carmen Maria Machado as a winner of the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards, and the editor of Burn It Down (2019), a critically acclaimed anthology of essays on women's anger from Seal Press. Lilly is a contributing editor at Catapult, and assistant editor at Barrelhouse Books. Her writing has been published by Guernica, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, Longreads, The Washington Post, Playboy, Rolling Stone, and more. Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius Follow us on social at: Twitter: @WakeIslandPod Instagram: @wakeislandpod --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support

Dennis Cooper is on Wake Island! We talk about: Hoarders, escorts & slaves, dark rides, haunted houses, his forthcoming book I Wished, creating a literary monument to George Myles through the medium of devotion, the home as a universe, emotional history, Russian twink porn, Bjork’s meltdown, John Wayne Gacy, disliking objectification, the dying breed of emo escorts, the enduring sadness of Epcot center… Dennis Cooper is best known for The George Miles Cycle, an interconnected sequence of five novels that includes Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period. His post-George Miles Cycle novels include My Loose Thread, The Sluts and God, Jr. Other works include the short-story collections Wrong and Ugly Man, poetry collections The Dream Police and The Weaklings, as well as the recent Smothered in Hugs: Essays, Interviews, Feedback, and Obituaries. He’s also written for the stage with theater director Gisèle Vienne and directed two films with Zac Farley called: Like Cattle Towards Glow and Permanent Green Light. Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius Follow us on social at: Twitter: @WakeIslandPod Instagram: @wakeislandpod --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support

Gina Frangello is the author of BLOW YOUR HOUSE DOWN: A Story or Family, Feminism, and Treason, EVERY KIND OF WANTING, & A LIFE IN MEN. Nonfiction editor at LA Review of Books. A Life in Men: A Novel is currently under production with Charlize Theron's production company Denver & Delilah for Netflix which will star Kristen Stewart and Riley Keough. "Compelling, honest, and thought-provoking, Gina Frangello's memoir is an inspired addition to her astounding body of work." —Charlize Theron Gina Frangello spent her early adulthood trying to outrun a youth marked by poverty and violence. Now a long-married wife and devoted mother, the better life she carefully built is emotionally upended by the death of her closest friend. Soon, awakened to fault lines in her troubled marriage, Frangello is caught up in a recklessly passionate affair, leading a double life while continuing to project the image of the perfect family. When her secrets are finally uncovered, both her home and her identity will implode, testing the limits of desire, responsibility, love, and forgiveness. A New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice • A Good Morning America Recommended Book • A BuzzFeed Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Lit Hub Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Rumpus Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Bustle Most Anticipated Book of the Month GINA FRANGELLO is also the Sunday editor for The Rumpus and the fiction editor for The Nervous Breakdown, and is on faculty at UCR-Palm Desert's low residency MFA program in Creative Writing. The longtime Executive Editor of Other Voices magazine and Other Voices Books, she now runs Other Voices Querétaro, an international writing program. Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius Follow us on social at: Twitter: @WakeIslandPod Instagram: @wakeislandpod --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support

Literary horror icon Brian Evenson is on the show! We talk about: the uncanny psychogeography of Utah, religious text & parables, writing as a replacement for spirituality, Brian’s philosophical approach, the machinations of Dark Properties, Michael Gira’s The Consumer, the trancelike intensity of the Soundtrack for the Blind by the Swans, Sunn O))), and Pierre Guyotat's writing, Deleuze and Guattari, the Evensonesque aesthetic and trajectory, our loss of agency to technology, distortion/blur, the appeal of invoking destabilization, Immobility, the relationship between the mode of horror and mood, being a mentor, comfort listening.... “There is not a more intense, prolific, or apocalyptic writer of fiction in America than Brian Evenson.” —George Saunders “Missing persons, paranoia and psychosis . . . the kind of writer who leads you into the labyrinth, then abandons you there. It’s hard to believe a guy can be so frightening, so consistently.” —New York Times Brian Evenson is the author of over a dozen works of fiction. He has received three O. Henry Prizes for his fiction. His most recent book, Song for the Unraveling of the World, won a Shirley Jackson Award and was a finalist for both the Los Angeles Times Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Speculative Fiction and the Balcones Fiction Prize. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches at CalArts. THE GLASSY, BURNING FLOOR OF HELL comes out in August 2021 by Coffee House Press - preorder here. A sentient, murderous prosthetic leg; shadowy creatures lurking behind a shimmering wall; brutal barrow men―of all the terrors that populate The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell, perhaps the most alarming are the beings who decimated the habitable Earth: humans. In this new short story collection, Brian Evenson envisions a chilling future beyond the Anthropocene that forces excruciating decisions about survival and self-sacrifice in the face of toxic air and a natural world torn between revenge and regeneration. Combining psychological and ecological horror, each tale thrums with Evenson’s award-winning literary craftsmanship, dark humor, and thrilling suspense. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support

David Leo RIce co-hosts this special episode of Wake Island in which we interview historian Peter Vronsky. We discuss serial murderer consciousness and the golden age of serial killers -- we range widely from werewolves to WWII, Bundy to Dahmer, and the latent urges that turned the America of our childhood into a carnival of serial murder. With books like Serial Killers, Female Serial Killers and Sons of Cain, Peter Vronsky has established himself as the foremost expert on the history of serial killers. In this first definitive history of the "Golden Age" of American serial murder, when the number and body count of serial killers exploded, Vronsky tells the stories of the most unusual and prominent serial killings from the 1950s to the early twenty-first century. From Ted Bundy to the Golden State Killer, our fascination with these classic serial killers seems to grow by the day. American Serial Killers gives true crime junkies what they crave, with both perennial favorites (Ed Kemper, Jeffrey Dahmer) and lesser-known cases (Melvin Rees, Harvey Glatman). Peter Vronsky, PhD, is an investigative historian and a former film and television documentary producer. He is the author of Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters; Female Serial Killers: How and Why Women Become Monsters; and Sons of Cain: A History of Serial Killers from the Stone Age to the Present. He is an authority on Canada’s first modern battle, which he has written about in his definitive book, Ridgeway: The American Fenian Invasion and the 1866 Battle That Made Canada. Peter Vronsky holds a PhD from the University of Toronto in the fields of criminal justice history and the history of espionage in international relations. He teaches history at Ryerson University in Toronto. He divides his time between Toronto, Canada, and Venice, Italy. Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius Follow us on social at: Twitter: @WakeIslandPod Instagram: @wakeislandpod --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support

Bateman’s directorial feature film debut of her own script, VIOLET, stars Olivia Munn, Luke Bracey, and Justin Theroux, and had its World Premiere at the 2021 SXSW Film Festival. Her best-selling first book, FAME, a non-fiction about the life cycle of Fame and society’s strong need for it, was published in 2018 by Akashic Books. Her second book, FACE, is also a best seller. It’s about women’s faces getting older and why that makes people angry. It was released April 2021 by Akashic. Her writing has been published by Dame Magazine, Salon.com, and McSweeney’s. An advocate for Net Neutrality, Justine has testified before the Senate Commerce Committee on its behalf in Washington DC and served as an Advisor to FreePress.com. Her former acting work includes Family Ties, Satisfaction, Men Behaving Badly, The TV Set, Desperate Housewives, and Californication. Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius Follow us on social at: Twitter: @WakeIslandPod Instagram: @wakeislandpod --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support

Throughout her life, Elissa Washuta has been surrounded by cheap facsimiles of Native spiritual tools and occult trends, “starter witch kits” of sage, rose quartz, and tarot cards packaged together in paper and plastic. Following a decade of abuse, addiction, PTSD, and heavy-duty drug treatment for a misdiagnosis of bipolar disorder, she felt drawn to the real spirits and powers her dispossessed and discarded ancestors knew, while she undertook necessary work to find love and meaning. In this collection of intertwined essays, she writes about land, heartbreak, and colonization, about life without the escape hatch of intoxication, and about how she became a powerful witch. She interlaces stories from her forebears with cultural artifacts from her own life—Twin Peaks, the Oregon Trail II video game, a Claymation Satan, a YouTube video of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham—to explore questions of cultural inheritance and the particular danger, as a Native woman, of relaxing into romantic love under colonial rule. Elissa Washuta is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and a nonfiction writer. She is the author of White Magic, My Body Is a Book of Rules, and Starvation Mode. With Theresa Warburton, she is co-editor of the anthology Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers. She’s a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship recipient, a Creative Capital awardee, and an assistant professor of creative writing at the Ohio State University. --cash.app/$wakeisland666 --Venmo: @wake-island666 Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius Follow us on social at: Twitter: @WakeIslandPod Instagram: @wakeislandpod --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support

Sam Tallent is on the show today. He’s a comedian and author. His debut novel is Running the Lights, and it’s about a road comic named Billy Ray Schafer who embodies the archetype of a tragic road comic who is trapped in the wreckage of his wasted career. In this conversation we get into being in punk bands, dealing with hecklers, taking mushrooms in the Poconos, watching magic shows on acid, boat acts, Brody Stevens, Ron White, Carrot Top, Vegas residencies, and the beauty of nihilism. “Brilliant writing. Astounding. One of the best books I’ve read. Ever. The best fictional representation of comedy in any medium.” - Doug Stanhope, iconoclast Buy Sam's book directly from his site. --cash.app/$wakeisland666 --Venmo: @wake-island666 Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius Follow us on social at: Twitter: @WakeIslandPod Instagram: @wakeislandpod --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support

In Burroughs and Scotland, Chris Kelso explores the relationship between William S. Burroughs (author of Naked Lunch, Junkie, and The Soft Machine) and a country very much attuned to the Beat author’s provocative, transgressive sci-fi style of literature. Kelso investigates why Burroughs was drawn to Scotland, why Scotland was drawn to Burroughs, and what exactly the author got up to during his various visits to Edinburgh. Chris Kelso is a British Fantasy Award-nominated genre writer, illustrator, editor, screenwriter, and journalist. His work has been translated into French, Spanish and Swedish. He is the 2 times winner of the Ginger Nuts of Horror Novel of the Year ( in 2016 for Unger House Radicals’ and 2017 for ‘Shrapnel Apartments). --cash.app/$wakeisland666 --Venmo: @wake-island666 Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius Follow us on social at: Twitter: @WakeIslandPod Instagram: @wakeislandpod --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support

Jump down the rabbit hole with Gina and I - in this episode we talk about: the enchantment of malls, movies like It Follows/Poltergeists/Showgirls, child beauty pageants, synesthesia, pandemic dreams, the final girl archetype, and the lost magic of video stores. Gina's book Night Rooms is an atmospheric dreamscape of memories intertwined with horror movies. Night Rooms is out now from Two Dollar Radio. "Jumping between past and present with ease, Nutt slashes to the center of issues like motherhood and depression and ultimately emerges as the quintessential final girl of her own film... Nutt has a knack for short, sharp lines that skip the brain and go straight to the heart." —Gabino Iglesias, NPR “In a horror movie, an infected character may hide a bite or rash, an urge, an unwellness. She might withdraw or act out, or behave as if nothing is the matter, nothing has happened. Any course of action opposite saying how she feels suggests suffering privately is preferable to the anticipated betrayal of being cast out.” Gina Nutt is the author of the poetry collection Wilderness Champion. She earned her MFA from Syracuse University. Her writing has appeared in Cosmonauts Avenue, Joyland, Ninth Letter, and other publications. cash.app/$wakeisland666      --Venmo: @wake-island666  Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius  Follow us on social at:  Twitter: @WakeIslandPod  Instagram: @wakeislandpod --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support

On this episode Chris and I discuss two movies we adore: Baise-moi and Sauvage. Through these films we have an honest and open conversation about: sex work, nihilism, transgression/transformation, subverted expectations, feminism, and porn.   Baise-moi (Virginie Despentes, Coralie Trinh Thi, 2000) — Two young women, marginalized by society, go on a destructive tour of sex and violence. Breaking norms and killing men - and shattering the complacency of polite cinema audiences.  Sauvage (Camille Vidal-Naquet, 2018) — A young street hustler leads a debauched life of turning tricks and taking drugs while longing for love.  Christopher Zeischegg is a writer, musician, and filmmaker who spent eight years working in the adult industry as performer, Danny Wylde. He is the author of four books, Come to my Brother, The Wolves that Live in Skin and Space, Body to Job, and The Magician, and has contributed to The Feminist Porn Book, Best Sex Writing, Coming Out Like a Porn Star, Split Lips, and a variety of digital publications, such as Somesuch and The Nervous Breakdown. The Broadly interview with Virginie Despentes we reference.  --cash.app/$wakeisland666     --Venmo: @wake-island666 Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius Follow us on social at: Twitter: @WakeIslandPod Instagram: @wakeislandpod --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support

David and I drill down into the emendation point of Americana’s psychic crisis and investigate its rotten core. We also talk about seediness, the uncanny and drift. David Leo Rice is the author of ‘A Room in Dodge City’ (Alternating Current, 2017) and ‘A Room in Dodge City 2’ (Alternating Current, 2021), ‘Angel House’ (Kernpunkt, 2019) a Dennis Cooper ‘Book of the Year’ and ‘The PornME Trilogy’ (The Opiate Books, 2020). His short fiction has been been published in Hobart, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, DIAGRAM and The Rupture, among many other venues. David currently teaches creative writing at The New School. The article we reference is: On Seediness, Undead Literature, and Reengaging with the American Mythic in the 2020s Preorder - ‘Drifter: Stories’ (11:11 Press, 2021) --cash.app/$wakeisland666 --Venmo: @wake-island666 Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius Follow us on social at: Twitter: @WakeIslandPod Instagram: @wakeislandpod --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support

Audrey Szasz (aka Zutka) is a London-based writer with roots in Central Europe. Her experimental narratives combine vivid prose with exotic imagery and transgressive satire. Tears of a Komsomol Girl (Infinity Land Press, 2020) is her first full-length novel. She has been described alternately as ‘the postmodern heir to the disarranged novels of Anna Kavan and more closely, Ann Quin,’ and ‘a deviant genius of surreal and perverse image-play.’ Audrey’s debut in print, Plan for the Abduction of J.G. Ballard (a collaboration with Jeremy Reed) was published in 2019 via Infinity Land Press. In February 2020, Amphetamine Sulphate issued her first solo novella, Invisibility: A Manifesto. Tears of a Komsomol Girl is an experimental concept novel based on the real-life crimes of Soviet serial killer Andrei Chikatilo, who was finally executed in 1994 having been convicted of murdering 52 people between 1978 and 1990. --cash.app/$wakeisland666 —-Venmo: @wake-island666 Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius Follow us on social at: Twitter: @WakeIslandPod Instagram: @wakeislandpod --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support

In November 2013, Rose Andersen's younger sister Sarah died of an overdose in the bathroom of her boyfriend's home in a small town with one of the highest rates of opioid use in the state. Like too many of her generation, she had become addicted to heroin. Sarah was 24 years old. To imagine her way into Sarah's life and her choices, Rose revisits their volatile childhood, marked by their stepfather's omnipresent rage. As the dysfunction comes into focus, so does a broader picture of the opioid crisis and the drug rehabilitation industry in small towns across America. And when Rose learns from the coroner that Sarah's cause of death was a methamphetamine overdose, the story takes a wildly unexpected turn. "The memoir of a sister's death in which the line between overdose and murder becomes blurred, The Heart and Other Monsters is the story of two girls wounded by addiction and simultaneously troubled and sustained by a broken, complex family whose actions frequently fall short of their ideals. With the fierce honesty of Domenica Ruta's With or Without You, this is the most clearsighted depiction I know of what it's like to piece life together after a great, irreparable loss, and a deft navigation of the byways and channels leading up to that loss, through it, and beyond." - Brian Evenson, author of SONG FOR THE UNRAVELING OF THE WORLD Rose Andersen’s debut memoir, The Heart and Other Monsters is now available from Bloomsbury. She received her MFA in writing at California Institute of the Arts where she was awarded the CalArts Emi Kuriyama Thesis Prize. She writes to the dulcimer snores of her Boston Terrier, Charlotte, and completes her stories despite the endless barrage of puns from her spouse, Josh. She is published in The Cut, Glamour, The California Sunday, Lit Hub, and Crime Reads among others. ---cash.app/$wakeisland666 —-Venmo: @wake-island666 Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius Follow us on social at: Twitter: @WakeIslandPod Instagram: @wakeislandpod --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support

Eileen Myles (they/them) came to New York from Boston in 1974 to be a poet. Their books include For Now (an essay/talk about writing), I Must Be Living Twice/new and selected poems, and Chelsea Girls. They showed their photographs in 2019 at Bridget Donahue, NYC. Eileen has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and an award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. They live in New York and Marfa, TX. Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius Follow us on social at: Twitter: @WakeIslandPod Instagram: @wakeislandpod --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support

During this conversation we talk about jail dildos and Los Angeles. Eris marries starry-eyed feral lust with California decadence and punk poetry in a sensory carnival of bleary abstraction and bubblegum. Meet Madzi, our narrator’s dream girl, Rorschach of the feminine ideal, a hot mess dripping sex appeal and riling you up, making your life magical and sublime before leaving a trail of dirty clothes and synthetic rails into your worst nightmare. Ruthless Little Things is a tender, sorehearted transmission from a self-made prison, and an earnest flight toward escape. It is manic, sanguine, surreal, sad and revealing. Its lines burn themselves into you. It wreaks havoc and it never lies to you. Elizabeth Victoria Aldrich speaks more truth in this slim elegant glitterbomb than most writers speak in an entire lifetime. — James Nulick, author of The Moon Down to Earth Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius Follow us on social at: Twitter: @WakeIslandPod Instagram: @wakeislandpod --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support

A young woman is found dead on the floor of a Tijuana hotel room. An ID in a nearby purse reads “Atlantis Black.” The police report states that the body does not seem to match the identification, yet the body is quickly cremated and the case is considered closed. So begins Betsy Bonner’s search for her sister, Atlantis, and the unraveling of the mysterious final months before Atlantis’s disappearance, alleged overdose, and death. With access to her sister’s email and social media accounts, Bonner attempts to decipher and construct a narrative: frantic and unintelligible Facebook posts, alarming images of a woman with a handgun, Craigslist companionship ads, DEA agent testimony, video surveillance, police reports, and various phone calls and moments in the flesh conjured from memory. Through a history only she and Atlantis shared—a childhood fraught with abuse and mental illness, Atlantis’s precocious yet short rise in the music world, and through it all an unshakable bond of sisterhood—Bonner finds questions that lead only to more questions and possible clues that seem to point in no particular direction. In this haunting memoir and piercing true crime account, Bonner must decide how far she will go to understand a sister who, like the mythical island she renamed herself for, might prove impossible to find. “A haunting, mind-bending memoir. . . . riveting.” —New York Times “A mixture of biography and true crime, this narrative . . . offers more plot twists, shocking revelations and shady characters than most contemporary thrillers.” —NPR Betsy Bonner is the author of the poetry collection Round Lake. She is a former Director of the 92Y Unterberg Poetry Center, where she now teaches creative writing. She is a fellow of the MacDowell Colony and the T. S. Eliot House. "Core" Written & performed by Atlantis Black Home demo (2002) "Core" (cover) Written by Atlantis Black Tara Sullivan on vox, guitars, and bass Stephen Edwards on drums Home demo (2020) Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius Follow us on social at: Twitter: @WakeIslandPod Instagram: @wakeislandpod --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support

Derek McCormack's latest book is Castle Faggot (Semiotext(e)). His previous books include The Show that Smells, The Well-Dressed Wound, Grab Bag and The Haunted Hillbilly. We talk about: the childhood memories and objects that inform Derek's aesthetic, confronting cancer, American vs Canadian kitsch, what makes camp, crystalizing shit into shit necklaces, lethal coziness, the emotional center of Castle Faggot, ebay shopping on ambien, shopping at Barneys, weird celebrity sightings, theme parks, marshmallowy children's cereal, fashion, and did I mention shit!? Castle Faggot is a dark satire about an amusement park more deranged than anything Disney could imagine: a playland for gay men called Faggotland. Castle Faggot is Derek McCormack's darkest and most delicious book yet, a satire of sugary cereals and Saturday morning cartoons set in an amusement park more deranged than anything Disney dreamed up. At the heart of the park is Faggotland, a playland for gay men, and Castle Faggot, the darkest dark ride in the world. Home to a cartoon Dracula called Count Choc-o-log, the castle is decorated with the corpses of gays—some were killed, some killed themselves, all ended up as décor. "It is really just one of the best books ever, and maybe the greatest novel ever written." Dennis Cooper Make sure to follow Derek on Instagram at: https://www.instagram.com/derek_mccormack/ Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius Follow us on social at: Twitter: @WakeIslandPod Instagram: @wakeislandpod The Star of Bethlehem is played by TRG Banks --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support