The pub is a shithole, just down the road.

"For Christmas, Pikey 'invites' the team, including the temps, for slap-up Crimbo nosh at a local pub. Presumably, she's been allocated a budget for team-bonding. The pub is a shithole just down the road. The clientele are dolescum, drug dealers, prostitutes, junkies, schizophrenics, and bank workers. Everyone orders lager. The barman stares when you ask for 'a glass of red wine'; it's a familiar look, one you will encounter throughout your 4.5 years. Finally, they dig up a half-bottle. One of the permascum, a huge muscled chump with designer jeans and t-shirt, sneers down at you: Do you not drink pints, Elberry?"

~~ from the memoir 4.5 as included in Walter Aske's Vocations

Walter Aske's Vocations

 

Walter Aske's Vocations includes a 200-page memoir of his temp career.

book review of Scotty Plays Guitar

Travis Shosa reviews Dimitry Kogan's Scotty Plays Guitar.

Hugh Blanton's review of Fight for Your Long Day

Hugh Blanton's thoughts on Fight for Your Long Day arrive after his consideration of Auggie's Revenge.

Yung Pueblo's Nicomachean Ethics

 

~~ from Aristotle's The Way Forward 

Corona\Samizdat returns November 2026

Rick Harsch's Corona\Samizdat will have books for sale again by November. We've been told to refrain from ordering titles before then.

Where When It Rains by John F. Duffy

 

Where When It Rains by John F. Duffy

#fridayreads: 9/11 edition

Fight for Your Long Day is more of a War on Terror than 9/11 novel, but I'm sure that the good folks at interlibrary loan would want you to access a copy. If purchases are more to your pleasure, then shipped paperback copies of Auggie's Revenge and Fight for Your Long Day remain available at reasonable prices. There are also affordable copies of Auggie's Revenge at Apple Books, on eBay, and for Kindle as well as at Bookshop and Smashwords.

What do you teach?

"Upon my return to the US, he / asks my occupation. Teacher. / What do you teach? / Poetry. / I hate poetry, the office says, / I only like writing / where you can make an argument."

~~ from "He, Too" in Customs by Solmaz Sharif

The Brother from Another Planet

"and we the privileged few / from metal folding chairs in the dark / peep-a-show the world presents The Brother from Another Planet / you tell the white boy made it / the audacity / to think that / black people were universal slaves / when we are fucked on earth / thats all / just fucked up on earth"

~~ from "Princess Cruises" in Big Bank Take Little Bank by Paul Beatty