FEATURED
Author Archives: Nathan Huffstutter
Seven Days In Rio
In addition to holding a third-degree black belt, Francis Levy knows a thing or two about raising hell. Still, after glutting his first two novels with a blitz of psychosexual disorders and more bare-assed buggery than a stroke mag, should a stranger stop Levy on the subway and gush about being a huge, HUGE fan, the author’s first instinct would have to be an uh-oh backward step.
Installations sure to provoke as many walkouts as donors, Erotomania: A Romance and Seven Days in Rio offer opposite sides of the same satyric coin, with the former presenting by far the stickier flip. Despite its heady conceptual foundation, exploring animal instinct, recapitulation theory, and the dawning of human consciousness amid an evolving relationship, at the page-level, Erotomania’s boy-meets-nympho love story mostly just cums in your face. Liberated from his debut’s tedium of assplay and fluid discharge, Levy unleashes Seven Days in Rio as a no less frisky but much freer beast: where Erotomania propped the pounding over and over and over of compulsive sex atop an illusive psychoanalytic foundation, Rio props psychoanalysis atop an illusion, or delusion, of breezy tropical sex. Continue reading
Fragmentation + other stories
The air is festive. Loose shirts and drinks in red Solo cups, new friends and old. Some lug cameras, some clutch notepads, some even bothered putting on shoes. A deejay spins, head-nodding, cool, he’s not out to steal the show. Milling about the brink, the revelers peek over the ledge, trading shrugs and smiles. This thing they’ve built, they’re planning to send it hurtling down and no one’s sure if it’ll hold. Continue reading
Look! Look! Feathers by Mike Young
All apologies to Fresno, but driving the 350 miles between L.A. and San Francisco, the scenery unspools in little more than a piss and a half of endless, bleached nothing. Leaving the Bay Area and heading toward Southern Oregon, the Interstate rises out of the Central Valley and winds left of center. During these next 350 miles, pretty much the same piss and a half, the trees, the elevation, the entire character changes. In this corridor, Red Bluff to Yreka to Talent, the weeds and speed give way to off-ramp drags of greasy spoons and grizzled beards, canned greens and un-ironic curios, potholes and slush. Here, where most pull over just long enough to fill up and flush out, Mike Young takes up residence. Continue reading
