It’s cliché to point out that people in the United States now exist in completely different realities, typically broken down by political leanings. Just hop on any social media platform and you can bear witness. For one faction, Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton are eating babies and guzzling adrenochrome in the basement of a strip … Continue reading
You may not know this, dearest Filthy Dreams fanatics, but I’ve occasionally been accused of being long-winded. Rambling. Exhausting. Draining. Just a tad wordy. In a culture where we have writers and editors tweet-advising us to make articles shorter and more palatable for readers, I tend to do the opposite. I don’t care who likes … Continue reading
“Topanga’s hot today, Manson’s in the air,” sings Lana Del Rey in the second verse of her song “Heroin” on Lust for Life. And who doesn’t sense Charles Manson, his acid-headed Family, and the echoing terror of the Tate-LaBianca murders in these sweltering and wildfire-choked days of early August? These murders that occurred from August … Continue reading
As primarily nonfiction readers, your faithful co-founder Emily Colucci and contributor Jessica Caroline have been making an effort to overcome our general reluctance to engage more in contemporary fiction. We gave Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts and Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby a whirl. However, it’s not like authors at larger publishing houses are in dire need of … Continue reading
Represented by a logo of a human eye and eyebrow, with the eye acting as a razor blade, Infinity Land Press is, by its own website’s description, “a press that provides exclusive, clandestine publications which are inoculated against the circulatory system of the established book market.” Created and founded by artists Martin Bladh and Karolina … Continue reading
If I had a favorite narrative genre, it would be what I like to call “psychological disintegration.” I’ve long been seduced by madness, the deterioration of identity. The descent into madness of the lonely civil servant Poprishchin in Gogol’s Diary of a Mad Man. The identity confusion of Trelkovsky in novelist and artist Roland Topor’s … Continue reading
Ever since the Great Toilet Paper Hoard of 2020, marking the start of quarantine, the Internet has been full of people howling into the abyss about the agonizing pain their gnawing isolation, a collective holler of loneliness that can, at times, overpower even the accounts of people suffering through COVID-19. Months later, all these lonely … Continue reading
“If you really loved me…”–Ziggy slugs–“you wouldn’t rim me while I’m crying.” This is John Waters’ favorite line from Dennis Cooper’s George Miles Cycle, read in a surprise appearance at an event at NYU’s Fales Library and Special Collections in 2000 celebrating the publication of the final book of the Cycle, Period. Specifically deriving from … Continue reading
“I want you to teach me how to be fabulous,” pleads Macaulay Culkin inhabiting the role of infamous club kid Michael Alig in 2003’s cheeseball Party Monster. In response, Seth Green’s James St. James spits back, “We have nothing in common,” picks up his metal lunchbox/purse, and changes his mind, quoting William Blake: “The road … Continue reading
“Kathy Acker’s drunken girls, she meant us, that’s the way she read to us…” –Pam Brown “1995” “At a certain point, I realized the ‘I’ doesn’t exist. So I said to myself: if the ‘I’ doesn’t exist, I have to construct one, or maybe even more than one,” remarked experimental fiction icon and Filthy Dreams … Continue reading