ExPat Press

Catfish – Charlie Chitty

May 24, 2022

The days of Los Angeles are hot, but even the nights are humid. Winds, clouds and rains are turned back by the towering San Gabriel Mountains eternally dusted with snow.

The skyline is mostly flashing lights of planes in place of stars, freckled with fog. All the way through the streets you can hear life as it takes out perfectly polished phones to take pictures of perfectly folded spaghetti cooked by perfectly underpaid chefs.

Columns

Interview with Teddy Burnette

May 18, 2022

MM) A novel that captures the ethereal, nearly imperceptible nerve pinch of romantic love and its vacant, autonomic qualities, like muscle memory of safety. Is Heartfelt Anything concerned with the primal, involuntary properties of love? It feels tuned to a spectral frequency, the characters are identified by one letter. Is this a kind of universal story, or how does it engage with other romantic novels?

TB) Heartfelt Anything is tuned to the frequency of the character whose mind the story,

Art

Possessed by Foxes – Réka Nyitrai

May 17, 2022

Self-portrait as marriage bed

I am a marriage bed sewn into the skin of a sacrificed horse. I am a widow who, inside her late husband’s heart, found an empty suitcase filled with his sweetheart’s bathing suits. I am a dewdrop rolling from a leaf. I am a band of light pooling on God’s shaved scalp.

Columns

Interview with Derek Maine

May 13, 2022

MM) Your novel is titled Characters and while there are many characters you are arguably the main one. Its nature is solipsistic and cerebral, with an orchestral sort of interiority whereby the narrator’s thoughts skitter and hiccup around with musicality. When you read the Dolphin Lane Motel excerpt live on a Brooklyn rooftop at the Blank Swan expat event, you paced and sped up, oscillating between a quavering sonority and more blunt punctae.