Gass’s suggestion that the monstrosity of the Shoah could easily arise from much smaller gestures of hate no longer seems, in the present, like a trivialization of genocide—it is a field guide to the unchecked regions where only anger can find reliably fertile ground.
William Gass, Prophet of the Midwest
Gass saw all this coming from the vantage point of the Midwest. Perhaps the flatness and lack of skyscrapers allowed him to see farther.
I’ve become someone who hates to let things go.
The pieces you will find in this issue address not just the end, but perhaps what happens after.
The year’s best books, as selected by the editors of Full Stop.
What emerges in the warped virgin birth from the chest of Officer Kane is not an incarnation of a benevolent Godhead, but Lovecraftian cosmic horror.
We meet amid and through our acts of reading and writing each other. Together we find a place to work, and this is literature.
What if invention, undertaken as a collective project, were the most powerful rejoinder both to the constraining pretend-pragmatism of much mainstream politics and to the dogmatically asserted “alternative facts” of populist, right-wing demagoguery?
Images are easy to project ourselves onto—we’re taught to do so, after all—but it’s a bit harder to describe what’s on the inside, especially when we misconstrue our detachment as a vacancy, rather than a conscious subduing of pain.
Waiting for the End of the World
In Durham, where Leave gained 57.5% of the referendum vote, one could see a man walking around the city center, bearing a sign that read, “LEAVE THE EU – RETURN TO YOUR GOD.”