Prose off: Story about a thrilling ride in an Uber put forward by Guggenheim winner Wendy Lesser in The Threepenny Review v. Fleming story

Thursday 3/19/26

As one may recall, I recently likened Wendy "The Bag of Hag" Lesser, editor of The Threepenny Review, dug-in classist, unstable, cowardly bully, impressively droning, pretentious, boring writer (maybe we should start pitting some of these people against each other in Boring Offs?), Guggenheim winner (of course), bigot, hooker upper of the "right" kind of people, to the embittered human version of projectile vomit, which I feel confident in saying is the most accurate thing anyone has ever said about her.

We haven't done some prose offs in a bit here, in part because, well, several reasons. There's so much for me to write every day. Also, I don't like have to do what I must do regarding the people of this system of incestuous evil, this system of anti-reading, anti-great writing, which exists so that the people of this system of incestuous evil can be the people of this system.

I just want a level playing field, and may the best person win, and for great writing to exist, and be able to get to the world and make this world a better place, which it desperately needs, and which almost all of these people of this system of incestuous evil don't care about, or are against with everything they are. All of that badness.

There are hundreds of these entries to come. I'll keep going with it as long as I need to. But there's a problem in that it's all equally dreadful. Obviously that's a large problem in terms of people reading.

This is the best there is, huh? This crap by these people? And then people being what they are, they're told all of this is amazing, they see some of it, they don't like it at all, they blame themselves ("Well, I wasn't an English major, so I don't know") and they never return again, opting for any of the other billion things out there they can check out and have rot their brains further.

People like Wendy Lesser don't care. People like Patrick Ryan. People like Christopher Beha. People like Sigrid Rausing. People like Adeena Reitberger and Rebecca Markovits. People like Michael Ray. People like Ann Hulbert.

Because they just want to be those people, in the positions they have, with what they think it means--though it means nothing in the grand scheme of anything--with the power they think is their birthright.

And when no one sees, no one cares, because these people have helped move the art of writing to the furthest edge of the margin, then it's easier to just keep doing what you're doing and being what you're being.

Which is what they want. It's all they want. They're comfortable enough financially. They were always going to be.

That's why they do it. That's why they're here. They usually come from money and are independently wealthy. Then you have all the trust fund writers in Brooklyn, with their MFAs, who roll out of bed at ten o'clock in the morning, get going around noon, meet each for lunch, talk about their work in progress left over from their Iowa days--you know, the fictionalized account of some writer in academia who is them.

And anyone who wants to write, usually does so for the sole reason of wishing to have this thing, a de facto ID badge, that they think makes them special.

Can't fake being a basketball player, can you? Can't fake being a mezzo-soprano, can't fake being a doctor, can't fake being an architect.

And even if you fake being a painter, to go with another arts-centered type of ID branding, unless you're an Abstract Expressionist, your painting still has to look like something, doesn't it? Harder to fake that's a tree when no one who looks at the painting thinks it is.

But here? You can be the worst in the world that anyone is at anything, and you're a writer. Or you can say you are. The people of the MFA system have no way to make money as pertains to writing than to drive people who also can't write, who don't really care about writing, who don't write for the right reasons, who don't write for readers and who don't care a wit about the reader on the other side of the table, but rather their egos and trying to compensate for their heaping amounts of insecurity and lack of feeling "special," into these MFA programs, where they're taught that this shit is good, and you should write this shit and only this shit.

And oh yes--the writing has to be repeatable. The modes, the techniques, the forms, the voice. That is, you can teach someone else how to do the bad writing you do. Because if people need imagination, you won't have enough of them to stock your koi pond.

It's a system of vomiting up that which has been consumed, and then ingesting the vomit.

Vomit, consume, vomit, consume.

People want to fit in, they want expressed approval and compliments (no matter how false and insincere those things may be; they can get themselves to believe in anything, especially when they're desperate to), they're weak, they're not their own person, they weren't doing this for the right reason anyway so it's not like they have convictions, and ours is a world in which people cower and cave, rather than stand up and be themselves.

As a result, you have no one in the world who can write fiction well, let alone create great fiction that matters and can impact lives and this world. There's no cavalry. If you are in these places, if you are getting these deals, if you winning these awards, you are one of these people who writes this way.

And the whole thing is circling the drain. That can go on for a while, because of patrons, grants, old money. But this isn't about art and it's not a business either, unless you want to call it a business of pettiness, insecurity, classism, and lies to self.

A Wendy Lesser type of business, if you want.

There I am on a given day, and I've arisen at one in the morning on average to work for twelve straight hours on my writing, the same as I do to start every day, without a single day off in any year of my life, before I run stairs so that I can physically endure in addition to that which I must mentally and emotionally and spiritually endure with this being how things are, and after so much work, I'll think that I should do what must be done here in these pages, which I am deeply loath to do to begin with, because this isn't what I want to be doing, to have to do.

I want to write, reach the world, and be back in Rockport, in piece, immersed in art and nature, and creating. I want a level playing field.

Of course I would.

Wells Tower wouldn't. J. Robert Lennon wouldn't. George Saunders wouldn't. Joshua Cohen wouldn't. Because how would that go for them? They need this system to be this way, or there's nothing for them, nothing coming their way, nothing propping them up. There isn't even a single published piece, let alone the handouts they're given. Because none of that is earned by the quality of their writing. Obviously.

And we're not talking "Here's a crust of bread" handouts. We're talking a Pulitzer. We're talking being set up for your career by being including on The New Yorker's list of top twenty writers under forty that you need to pay lots of attention to as they go along in their careers, and then, in the case of the misogynistic, hyper-limited Wells Tower, doing nothing for more than a decade after that, because you don't have to and you have nothing. You're working with nothing. Smoke and mirrors, and you can't be bothered to drag out the old smoke machine and pull that curtain off of that heirloom mirror down in a corner of the basement.

And you never really were anything but a system dick-rider, and a recipient of system dick-riding at the bed's edge coming up for your face-fulls of official system-issued spunk.

Oh there's another!

Oh there's another!

The happy spunk tears of getting lots of things without having to be good at anything. Or even ever to have written so much as a single sentence in good, contrivance-free faith.

But: If you're someone like this and you type anything on enough pages to fill up a book--and it can be anything at all--and FSG, where the likes of our buddy Jackson Howard is to be found, puts it out, which would be an automatic, un-vetted given, then that book will be praised in The New York Times where we find the likes of Sadie Stein, and all up and down the chain. Very likely a Pulitzer finalist, and it will be on all of those "Best Books of the Year" lists come December. With Tower, they'd say, "He was brave enough to take as long as he needed to get it right," and he could have just typed whatever he wanted for a few days before and called it a book.

Because that's how it works here.

The Fait Accompli Club.

If you're angry right now, cursing me out, look at that writing. Look. At. That. Writing. Look how uniformly awful it is in the linked-to examples above. You cannot defend that writing from those people as good writing.

You can't even do the "It's all subjective" cop out, because if we're sitting there, and I read that back to you, any of it, and people are watching us out in the stands, and I say, "So, you think that might good, huh? Or someone might think it's amazing?" you can't say, "Yes!" because a person who does so can only look like a clown and who wants to try and do that?

This is worse than criminal. Bob Dylan said, "To live outside the law you must be honest," and what he meant is that in the places where the law doesn't reach, you need to be a truly good person, and an honest one, not to be wicked.

People will often only not do things because they can't get away with them. So if you can get away with those things, and you don't, it's because you're an honest, good person who answers to the moral code you carry around within you.

But you can do things that are worse than criminal in places where the law doesn't extend. It is there that you will find some of the most twisted things in all the world. The most backwards things. Evil free-styles there. It's like saying to the Devil, "Okay, Lucifer, do your worst," and Lucifer says, "Okay, cool, what are the rules of this game?" and the answer is, "There are none."

So you can be Allison Wright of the VQR and make a joke about Lorin Stein Lorin Stein-ing people har har har that's just Lorin being Lorin.

Living outside that law, and not honest at all. The singer in the song would argue that isn't living at all. Because it's so wrong. But these people wouldn't care about that. Which, of course, numbers among the reasons of why they're so limited, and the lack of value in their work in the instances when they're writers or writers as well as editors.

You'd be surprised how much of great writing has to do with being a good person. Because if you are a truly great writer, you are someone aiming, and living for, above all, to do something for people. So that they may live better. Know themselves better. Grow more. Laugh deeper. Shed. Regenerate. Help others more. Parent better. Be a better friend. Look first to what they can do for someone else, and then to themselves.

And the 2000 word entry here, with the care and due diligence, that is a prose off may get left to another day. Then another. I've had this plan, too, of getting up these other things, and then having a long run of consecutive writing and publishing-related entries on here, but then it's like there's always something else to tend to, address.

The writing by these system darlings is also so across-the-board bad that I'm overwhelmed in deciding what should be next. The New Yorker? The Atlantic? Granta? Some Guggenheim winners? Pulitzer Prize fiction winners?

It's all equally dreadful. I don't even like dragging the cursor over any of it to copy and paste it into here, like that's too much contact with meaninglessness and mediocrity, the latter being a word which feels far too generous, but when it's all more or less the same, it's all more or the less same.

But I feel like something put forward by Wendy Lesser makes for a viable restart, given what she is and how emblematic she is of how this all works at the various levels and in the assorted divisions (book division, lit mag division, article division, op-ed division, book review division, op-ed division, etc.).

For years, Wendy Lesser would receive work from me and turn it down within seconds of opening the email. Do you think I'm exaggerating, or do you think that I have, as they say these days, "receipts?"

You're busted, Bag of Hag.

When I finally said something after these many years of this--as she was hooking up one godawful writer after another, like the one you're about to see--she went off on me.

Like the lunatic she is. The discriminatory, envious, mentally wizened lunatic. Again: the embittered human version of projectile vomit. This is a nasty, nasty person. An ugly human being.

Remember in the past when I've spoken about these talking head types in sports media, how they know nothing about sports, be they sports now or sports history, let alone the historical ramifications of something happening now? And how they have no insight, no wit, no way with words.

A friend of mine had said that hearing any of these guys talk sports was no different than listening to your Uber driver talk sports. The guy taking you to the airport. Or your cousin at a cookout. Some guy at a bar. The people with the sports media jobs have no more knowledge or ability. They have those jobs, though, which is always about other things.

Insofar as there are in-demand skills today, and in a field like that, or an content-related field, those "skills" are how much of an idiot you are, how obnoxious you are, how unfunny you are, how loutish you are, how immature you are, so that you don't make anyone else think you're smarter or better than they are, which people hate.

People need to be able to look at Michael Felger and think, "I could be him," and, more to the point, "I'd be better at that gig than he is."

The same goes with most editors.

They need to be able to look at you and think you're on their level or below it. You think David "Ah, But at Least It's an Expensive Empty Suit" Remnick could hire someone he thought was much smarter than he is?

Come on. That wouldn't be allowed to be a thing.

But yes, that person making those millions of dollars talking about sports isn't offering anything beyond what your Uber drive could. My friend's set-up here was being in that car, getting the ride to the airport, is no different than the highest-level--as in platforming, compensation, visibility--of sports talk.

So it goes with fiction. And we have a right-on-the-nose example, because it turns out that Wendy Lesser decided to publish a story by E.C. Osondu in the fall 2025 issue of The Threepenny Review called "Uber Talk," in which the entire story is just two guys having a conversation in an Uber.

I want you to make use of the link, which takes you to the whole story, so that you can see--if you have any need to verify that I'm telling the truth--that nothing happens in this story. The conversation isn't significant, nothing emerges, let alone a story. What I'm about to show you, of course, sucks, and you may wish to think I found the part that sucks the most, just like I searched for a story that sucks.

This particular story is the most recent one on the website of The Threepenny Review that was made digitally available. I can pick any story by any of these people, and again, if you are one of these people or one of their hypers/taint lickers/water carriers, I invite you to send me something of yours or theirs and we can do a prose off here.

You pick any damn thing you want by anyone in this system. Anybody. And there isn't anyone who is going to dare to do that, because you can hate me for this all you wish, but the real reason you hate me is because these things are true. And because what I do isn't what anyone here can do. And that includes you, if you are one of these people. That's my crime.

That's why, after twenty years of being punished for that, and locked out, and having to overcome billion to one odds for every thing I got, and then being punished harder for having achieved that thing--the fiction in Harper's, the NPR gig, the op-eds, whatever it was--I had to start speaking out here and showing how this all really works and why. I took the abuse and discrimination for decades, and soldiered on, polite and professional as can be.

You can't get these people to let you pass because your work is so great. They'll want to suppress you because of that. You can't get them to let you pass because you're polite, professional, qualified, comically overqualified, patience, persevering.

You can only get them to let you advance, never mind hype you, celebrate you, award you, by being seen by them as one of them.

Unless they feel like they have no choice.

Because if they have a choice, they're only going to allow anything to happen--and that goes right down to a Gerald Maa-type at a place almost all Americans save the people in this subculture have never heard of like the Georgia Review, which is held up as this...what...thing of significance here?; it's crazy; absolutely delusional--for people just like them, who are no smarter, no better at writing, no more knowledgeable, no more prolific, and above all, no more legitimate, no more the real deal, than they are.

Osondu checks the boxes a Lesser wants--needs in the desiccated, loveless husk that passes for her soul--to see checked.

But here we go. Let's look at that work. This is from "Uber Talk" by E.C. Osondu in the fall 2025 issue of The Threepenny Review, which is definitely better than anything I've ever written in my life, and which Wendy Lesser totally believes is true.

It was written all over him that he didn’t like to do this job. It was a hot day and the air conditioner in his car was not turned on. This was not a good sign. He was wearing a blue short-sleeved shirt. His face looked sweaty. It didn’t seem to bother him.

It was going to be a long ride and I wanted to be on his good side; otherwise it was going to make the ride seem longer. I remembered a man I met while waiting for the bus in the winter in upstate New York telling me that wait time appears to be longer if one is upset. 

“Do you want me to turn on the air conditioner?’ he asked.

“Do you need it?” I asked.

“I don’t really care much for it. In my country we do without the air conditioner, you know. But over here everywhere you go the air conditioner is working. I cannot sleep with the noise of the air conditioner in my ear buzzing all night.”

“Maybe when we get to the highway you can turn it on, okay?” I said.

“Sure, boss.”

“Where are you from? I asked.

“Greece,” he said.

I paused. Greece was one of those countries whose name I first encountered in the Bible when I was a kid. Back then it didn’t sound like a real country. It sounded like part of heaven. Thinking back, though, it is interesting how much Greece featured in our domestic life in the country of my birth. Our laundry soap, Premier Soap, came from a Greek company called Paterson Zochonis, or PZ in the local parlance. The biggest supermarket in my neighborhood was owned by the Leventis family. We even had a bunch of LP records by the bespectacled Greek singer Nana Mouskouri. 

He asked where I was from, and I told him. There was no reaction from him. Either the name did not register or he was distracted. I noticed he complained about every driver ahead of him.

“Look how he just switched lanes.”

“Why is he driving like that? Just crawling.”

“See how he cut into me. See, did you see that?”

Wow. That's amazing, man. What a genius are. What brilliant prose.

If you're a "regular" person, you might be thinking, "Why is this guy making such a big deal of a place called The Threepenny Review? Sounds like a stupid name. I've never heard of it. And a Review? A Review of what?"

I realize that people aren't going to look up anything in most cases, being as lazy as they are. So here's the thumbnail summary: This is considered one of the best of the places in the world that publishes fiction by the people of the literary world. It's this insane subculture. That's what these places really inhabit.

But there isn't anywhere else. There's nowhere for great fiction to go, which also doesn't matter because there isn't great fiction and no one is capable of writing any for the reasons I said above.

You want to write, you're ushered into this system--"Give us your money!"--and people are products of their environment unless they're like, you know, Ulysses, and they aren't.

Especially now.

Do you think that John Keats would have thought, "Huh, I could be a better writer if I was in a writing program" if they existed at the time? That's an absurd notion, isn't it? It never would have entered his mind, right?

Because he was an actual writer. An actual great writer. He'd be off somewhere finding his way, mastering his ability, and creating his art. He'd have had nothing to do with that world which would seek to exclude him as he stepped forward with the likes of what he ultimately wrote.

And I can say that about every great writer there's ever been. Not that there's ever been that many. Accepted, "official" history--and the canon--will deceive you that way. It's too hard. It takes too much. Too much ability, too much time. It has to be how you see the world, how you are, and what every second of your life is given over to. Every second. Everything has to be about it. For you to ever being to get good, let alone great, let alone unlike anyone else.

That's just the reality. Even if people had that ability in the first place, they don't have the rest of it in them. You will be alone, you will be always swimming against the current until someday, if it ever comes, that you aren't. You'll be feared, envied, hated. You'll deal with so many lies, so much passive aggressiveness.

That person will read what you wrote and know it's this amazing thing, and they won't be able to say it. They'll see if they can find a way to take a chip out of you. If they're in a position to publish it, even in some place no one has ever heard of, or a press that won't help you to sell five copies, for no financial compensation, they sure as hell won't. And they'll need to do that to feel a certain way about themselves.

You find me the genius. You find me the person of that vision and dedication. You find me the person of that strength. You find me the person that is all of these things in one person. Because that's what it would take.

And another person like that doesn't exist. So unless the person like that can get things to change and clear a new path so that others can and are going down it, this will all just go away entirely, and reading won't just be a thing that no one in society does, it won't even be a thing that's around at some point. The books won't even exist. Even those from before. Maybe in a museum. A digital, AI-curated museum.

I'm the only one fighting for the art of the written word. And what that can mean for humans. For humanness. For society, culture. Wellness. The world.

What? You think it's Laura Van Den Berg? You think it's Wendy Lesser? You think it's Deborah Treisman?

These people don't give a toss about writing. They only care about themselves. Their empty, conniving selves. And the upkeep of their sick, twisted egos.

You have to understand: There are these millions of people out there who've never read a single page of text, and yet they say they're a writer.

They'll have AI write "their" novel. Or they'll write on their own, and paste their "blurb"--a word they don't understand--on a writing subreddit, which is actually the first page of the comically bad thing they're working on, asking for feedback, saying this is their dream, etc.

You know what they really dream of?

Doing a book signing. People coming to them, standing in a line. Making their autograph and asking, "Who can I inscribe this to?"

That's what people want. That's not writing. They don't dream of reaching someone and changing their life, helping them discover themselves, or what they can be.

It's this other pathetic shit. This non-stuff that is the stuff.

And if you're Laura Van Den Berg, and you get a Guggenheim the same day as your equally talentless fiction writer husband Paul Yoon, because, woah, that's such an amazing and totally believable coincidence, nothing rigged about that, it's just a different version of this same thing. Being at a party and having someone like everyone else here come over to you and say, "I was much moved by your new fiction in The Atlantic. Brava, Laura, Brava."

These aren't reasons to do anything. At least when you have to take a piss there's a good reason.

Then you have these same people on the committees. Doing the blurbing, the extolling, the log rolling, the "This is the best book of the last five years"-ing. The anthologizing. Pushcarting. Best American Short Stories-ing.

It's like there you are having your day in court, and the judge is your dad.

So that's how you get The Threepenny Review, or whatever you wish to name, as "one of the best" blah blah blah. The blood relative in all but name only is sitting on the bench. Only here, it's incest and these people have eyes on stalks next to their navels, the better to spend their lives staring into them.

None of it's real, and none of it happens for the reasons it all purports to happen.

But this is real, the capper to this prose off.

I just need the one paragraph. Really, I only need a sentence. But I'll put a paragraph here. One from "Still Good," which is in There Is No Doubt: Story Girls.

“Thank you so much,” she added, and then repeated herself as though the words of a second ago hadn’t actually stopped and instead had started to spill over the ragged edge of what could still pass for a normal speaking voice and she honestly believed no one had ever done something nicer for her, but also like she was someone skilled at getting off the phone who lets you know it’d be better for them if they were done talking to you now without saying it. This was finished so that a moment was able to stay perfect. No chances taken. As real as the keys in her pocket. A file on her phone. The saved password. The line in the locket. And anything else would’ve said less than what she hadn’t denied anyway.

I ask again: Level playing field, anyone?

This is the same story I mentioned the other day with the forty-nine word paragraph, forty-four of those words being comprised of a single syllable. The first sentence of the above paragraph is physics defying, and I defy anyone to find a better sentence. Things happen in this sentence that ought not to be able to happen. Even mathematically.

The four words she says are repeated, but it's as though on the second time they're simply the words of the first time further along, like water that's part of a river.

That sentence is eighty-six words in length. Again, same story. And this sentence, and that earlier paragraph, are clearly voiced by the same person. What do we say? You can't fake voice.

Many of these publishing system people are wholly about fakery and fuckery. No one could ever fake the above, imitate it, approximate it, and it's done in the utmost of good faith for people. For readers. For humans. It is itself of the deepest humanness. There is nothing in the world like that paragraph, there never has been, there never will be.

There's no comparison here, and the only reason that needs saying is because that's true and yet people like Wendy Lesser still do what they do.

Need I tell you that E.C. Oscondu is Nigerian, which means that everything he writes will center on this. A bigoted halfwit like a Wendy Lesser will see his Nigerian name and think, "That's fashionable in the rarefied intellectual circles of which I'm a paragon" and see Nigerian words and terms and simply because of that (think how stupid and, again, bigoted you have to be, for this to be true) that that means this is impressive writing.

I invite you if you're a defender of the honor of such a person as a Wendy Lesser: Write me and tell me what you think is amazing about that story. Put your name on it.

If I'm so wrong, this should be easy, no? And if you're so correct, well, there you go.

The name, that he is mediocre, that he wrote a nothing story that means nothing, says nothing, does nothing, that he is no smarter than Wendy Lesser, that he is no threat to her pathetic ego, pathetic sense of self, and is a person of the system in these ways and more, is why that story ran in The Threepenny Review.

Honestly, a sentence like this, "We even had a bunch of LP records by the bespectacled Greek singer Nana Mouskouri," is what she prefers, because it's a box-checker. The last two words, the word Greek, and the use of bespectacled. These people also think, "Foreign names/terms = creative."

Hell, look how far Junot Diaz rode his one-trick pony. All he had to do was put in words that needed to be italicized, and these morons could pat themselves on the back that they were brave enough to walk into that neighborhood whose residents they'd call the cops on for setting foot in theirs, with this guy who couldn't invent a single character in his life. It's just him. And misogyny.

No ideas, no understanding of the world, human nature, let alone what's behind the veil. Just fictionalized, talentless him and assorted two-dimensional fictionalized versions of people he's known, and women who don't even have that much dimensionality in his work. Guggenheim, MacArthur genius grant, Pulitzer.

Speaking of Greece...you know who New Yorker fiction editor and publisher of Junot Diaz stories Deborah Treisman and people like her--and it's many of these people--are like? The woman in Pulp's "Common People." You know, the one who came from Greece with a thirst for knowledge. A poser playing at things, for self-administered back claps, who sees someone or something real and burning bright, and can only wonder why.

This is someone so obtuse that they have no idea--and don't really care--how artificial this thing is that they're hyping as at-the-pump authenticity.

That's the classism and impostering perpetually at play in this system.

And it's so obvious what the the writing is by these people is if you actually look at it. But that wasn't what was happening. Which ought to be amazing, but is the norm here.

Once you see one thing by any of these people, you've seen them all. Look at David Leavitt, about whom I'll have much to say in future. Going to do his gay thing. Could be nothing else. Tommy Orange is going to do his thing. Same thing every time. There's no invention. These people cannot invent. Someone else does their fictionalized white professor thing. Roxane Gay is going to do her thing.

Me, I never do the same thing twice. I don't have a thing. I create. I invent. This whole book is about women and girls, with everything from their side, and last time I checked, I wasn't a woman or girl.

It's really racist when you think about it, the reasons why a Wendy Lesser publishes that story. If the same story came in with my name at the top--or yours if it didn't check boxes--and had different terms, she would have turned it down right away. Work isn't published because the prose has been vetted.

Whether it's identity box-checking, cronyism, a combo, what these people think has to happen and be done given the particular name at the top or on the book, it's never about the writing, except when it becomes the problem of problems that a person so unlike these people, who isn't part of their reindeer games, who doesn't act like them, has morals and character, possesses vast expertise in the litany of areas, produces work infinitely beyond what they hype, award, teach, in terms of what is actually in that work.

Then we have a situation, and the solution, so far as the Wendy Lessers of this world are concerned is to lock arms, and keep that person out of their neighborhood, so to speak, to bring it back to that.

This woman doesn't have an honest bone in her body. Which is what you'd expect, I guess, from someone embodying the embittered human version of projectile vomit.

So there's us done with another prose off, but a quick couple of afterword-y thing. Bad as that Osondu story is, it's greatest crime is that it's just nothing. There's nothing there. Other times we have these stories that are equally bad in that there's nothing to them but they make you laugh at how bad something in them is, and over the idea that people seriously meant for you to take that writing seriously. And they had meetings about that story, like Raluca "Is It Time for Another Manic Moment? Albu was saying that time at BOMB.

Motorollah, Motorollah, Motorollah from Granta is a great example. That's so bad as to be a kind of comedy. And this is meant to be very serious, right? Proper brilliant writing, according to these people, who don't believe it themselves. In this same regard, the Oscondu story doesn't have anything in it like that "I let her infest" bit from Kate Busatto's Threepenny Review story chosen by Wendy Lesser that we looked at last year.

I let her infest! What does that even mean! How do you write that and think, "Yes! This is outstanding!" And then you send it to someone, a Guggenheim winner, and that person doesn't notice or care or stop and, you know, edit, and say, "um, yeah, this isn't a thing.."

Lastly: You'll note that I don't ever explain why I chose the illustration I did for each entry in here. That's because this is all meant for the longest book ever written, and that's to be a book of words and words alone, not pictures. But each image is chosen for specific reasons. You could probably read a fair amount into many of those images. I'll explain this one, though, as we're in an afterword.

It's an illustration from a century ago of Tammy Younger (born 1753), who was known as Queen of the Witches. She lived in what came to be called Dogtown, a settlement here in Massachusetts on Cape Ann, which has long been abandoned and is now covered in forest, though you can see the original foundation holes when you hike there if you know where to look.

Tammy Younger would guard this bridge, not allowing people to pass and placing a curse on them unless they gave her what she wanted. She was very much in the Wendy Lesser "Bag of Hag" tradition.

And look at those names...Tammy Younger...Wendy Lesser...

Hmmm...Reincarnation?