Loser at an angle

Behold Loser I.

 

"Eating Fried Chicken" live June 26, 2026

As part of a June 26 nine-minute video, Linh Dinh reads his classic "Eating Fried Chicken." The text of the poem can be found here.

Loser I is on the scene (and a print NYRB).

Read A.P. Balthazar, Alex "Kuder" Kudera, Alexandra Naughton, and Emily K. Sipiora in Mai Bell and Conor Hultman's Loser I.

 

the Lermontov medal

"It was an old, small, poor country church. The angel was in a chapel on the left, which the priest lighted. The image, buried in jewelry, stood in an iron cage with a padlocked door. The priest opened this and Bascomb placed his Lermontov medal at the angel's feet. Then he got to his knees and said loudly: 'God bless Walt Whitman. God bless Hart Crane. God bless Dylan Thomas. God bless William Faulkner, Scott Fitzgerald, and especially Ernest Hemingway.' The priest locked up the sacred relic and they left the church together."

 ~~ from "The World of Apples" in The Stories of John Cheever

The World of Apples

"Of the four poets with whom Bascomb was customarily grouped one had shot himself, one had drowned himself, one had hanged himself, and one had died of delirium tremens. Bascomb had known them all, loved most of them, and had nursed two of them when they were ill, but the broad implication that he had, by choosing to write poetry, chosen to destroy himself was something he rebelled against vigorously."

~~ from "The World of Apples" in The Stories of John Cheever

this past week's reading

From the June 2026 print a Harper's Magazine, articles I've read include "Tales of Trash: Memoirs of a Garbageman" as well as Kevin Lozano's "Strangers on a Train: The City that Bernie Goetz Made." I've also read Michael Gorra's "Call My Agent" in the June 25 New York Review of Books, several articles from the June 15 print Christian Science Monitor, and the first two short stories from Richard Ford's Sorry for Your Trouble.