Pluralistic: 14 Jun 2022


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Direct: The Problem of Middlemen

Kathryn Judge’s debut book is a hymn to short supply chains.

Back in 2007, I published my second short story collection, Overclocked. I was elated; not just because I’d published another book (the thrill of a new book has yet to pale even today, after dozens of books), but because it was a short-story collection, the kind of book I’d devoured as a kid, the mainstay of writers I’d worshiped, from Harlan Ellison to Spider Robinson to Kate Wilhelm. The publisher was Avalon, which had recently acquired Four Walls Eight Windows, the small press that had published my first short story collection, A Place So Foreign and Eight More. Selling a book to Four Walls had been its own thrill, as they were publisher to Abbie Hoffman, another writer I’d grown up on.

But then, something weird happened.

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Pluralistic: 07 Jun 2022


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Pluralistic: 25 May 2022


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Pluralistic: 27 Apr 2022


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Pluralistic: 25 Apr 2022


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Pluralistic: 16 Apr 2022


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Pluralistic: 12 Apr 2022


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Pluralistic: 09 Apr 2022


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Marc Laidlaw’s “Underneath the Oversea”

A wondrous fairytale, wondrously read, from the storyteller of Half-Life.

The cover of Skyboat Media’s audio edition of Underneath the Oversea.

I have been a Marc Laidlaw fan since his debut novel, Dad’s Nuke — an apocalyptic, madcap dark comedy/road-trip novel that anticipated Snow Crash and its motif of an America dominated by paranoid, fortresslike gated communities.

I avidly consumed all of his subsequent novels and short stories — especially “400 Boys,” his contribution to Bruce Sterling’s seminal cyberpunk anthology Mirrorshades.

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