Jarett Kobek – Only Americans Burn in Hell

An immortal faery queen from a magical gynocratic island arrives in Los Angeles to track down her missing daughter. This is actually the entire plot of a novel entitled Only Americans Burn in Hell. Of course, as in Jarett Kobek’s previous book, I Hate the Internet, the fictional element is a foil, with most of the pages […]

Down the Road from Charlottesville

As a young boy, he would go into the woods to hunt squirrels and rabbits with pellet guns. He would fish in a river right next to the family home. His father wasn’t an especially passionate hunter, but they would go together once a year, in deer season. “I grew up in nature,” he said. “That’s one of the reasons I wanted my own kids to grow up with acreage around them.” […]

The Dead Pimp, and Other Lessons

Dennis Hof was no run-of-the-mill pimp. He had starred in Cathouse, an HBO reality series set in one of his brothels, and authored a memoir, The Art of the Pimp. He was also the subject of rape allegations by multiple former employees. But Chuck Muth had realised the obvious: that, in the age of Trump, rape allegations against a famous TV pimp could be dismissed […]

Trump Rides West

On September 6th last year, President Donald Trump kicked off the autumn campaign season with a rally in Billings, Montana. He’d campaigned throughout the spring, and almost non-stop over the summer as well – indeed, he’d never really stopped campaigning since his own election victory – but now the primaries were over and the country was […]

From the Campaign Trail in Montana

“Are you here for the Jon event?” a young volunteer asked me as I arrived. The Jon event was taking place at lunchtime in late October, in a mid-sized function room on the campus of Montana State University, in the city of Bozeman. MSU was founded as an agricultural college by federal land grant in […]

The Torturer

CO-WRITTEN WITH JULIANO FIORI People say that this guy isn’t a concrete threat, said “Raíssa Leal, a 25-year-old student, as she left another event and headed home to her favela community in Jacarepaguá. “But his supporters are.” Indianara Siqueira, a veteran transgender rights activist attending a recent protest, reeled off a list of incidents she’d […]

Sergio de la Pava – Lost Empress

American mass-incarceration is the most overt object of the ‘protest’ of this novel’s subtitle. The author, Sergio De La Pava, works as a public defender in New York City, and calls on an intimate secondhand knowledge of the many different sorrows to be found in the ripples of a single criminal case. But Lost Empress is also […]

Sly Jazz

The National Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, in Upstate New York, lays out the sport’s history like an allegory of the long American century, its tragedies and glories. A gallery with the feel of a mausoleum enshrines the finest 1 per cent of players. They came from farms and small towns and urban slums, […]

Alt-right rally in Washington, DC, August 2018

There was great anxiety over turnout among the organisers of the white power rally “Unite the Right 2,” the follow-up to the infamous event in Charlottesville last year. Key members of the movement, also known as the alt-right, were snubbing the event. “We do not want the image of being a bunch of weird losers […]

Francisco Cantú – The Line Becomes a River

Carlos Fuentes imagined a Border Patrol Agent so racist that he feared a suntan. “Agent Dan Polonsky” prefers to work nocturnally; he likes to watch himself urinate through the otherworldly lens of his night-vision goggles. Polonsky “detested the illegals. But he adored and needed them. Without them, damn it, there would be no budget for […]