Kate Axelrod’s new book of stories, How to Get Along Without Me, is, to quote the jacket copy, “a collection that summons the perversity and poignance of twentysomething dating lives from a bracingly

Can you each pick two words to describe your book? 

Laura: Escapist fantasy

Eve: The first thing that came to mind for me was: “Oh, god.”

All the way up Highland isn’t Burbank, it’s heaven!

Her eyes looked up and zeroed in on Marina’s Muses. On the women floating through the air. No cares. Just an angel dancing in the blue heavens. 

The black Mr. Sketch marker, Cucumber JUUL pods, Dr Pepper Lip Smacker, spirit duplicator, soggy sugary cereal milk mush, pink rubber pencil shavings, burning toast stroke, pumpkin spice scented hand sanitizer. 

I eat a big salad and watch Kim and Kourtney eat big salads on a ten-year-old episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

We scuttled in through the back door, out of the glaring summer heat, bare feet welcoming the cool linoleum of the kitchen floor. Chattering like a pair of squirrels we rifled the pantry, pulling the

Lorena told Sofia to put a drop of her own pee
in her man’s beer
if she wanted him to love her
so she did 
and by God it worked.

The cop and strip club security guard had climbed onto the roof from outside the building and were trying to get in through the locked laundry room window. Claire let them in.

“Have you tried hookers?
Church? God? Your dead
mother? Pills? Coke? Crack?”

To a degree rarely rivaled, Sean Kilpatrick lives for words. Tantrums is a testament to the last twenty years of his life, and includes absolutely batshit scripts, joyfully brutal fiction, and

Bitter Water Opera is one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read.

His dreams fill with bell towers, stabbing deaths, his lifeless body dragged by split fingernails into consciousness.

“Because of nothing we are together.”
—KA

Now, there were two biographers and a documentary filmmaker circling her fame like the moons of Planet Kathy, goddess of love and lust rising in

It was not yet this day and age. A writer sent a proposal to his literary agent. The proposal concerned a major trauma. The agent submitted the proposal to a select few editors who made it the

She began imagining what it might have been like to be Agatha, crying and disheveled with both pale breasts exposed.

Let’s get more filthy!

In time, the questions become increasingly diffuse, numbers jumble and disappear, the symbolic order smears.

If I could be in The Fifth Element, I'd want to be in the scene where they pulled things out of the blue opera singer's belly. But I would want to keep pulling out new, surprising things.

She was always looking in the mirror.