Monthly Archives: July 2023

Notes on Contributors

Rotimi Babatunde‘s stories have been variously published and translated. His plays have been staged across continents. He is a recipient of the Caine Prize. He lives in Nigeria. Lauren Bajek is a writer, parent, and literary agent living in the American Rust Belt. Her fiction is published or forthcoming in Baffling Magazine, the Magazine of […]

Distant Worlds

TJ Benson (bio) Before the screams got to Zuana, he sprang out of sleep and clamped his teeth to mute his own. Panting, he looked around to make sure he was really alive, then he did the ten inhale-pause—exhale breath exercises his mother had taught him. Yes, this world was real, the nightmare was over. […]

A Blue House for Blue People

Gaby Zabar (bio) Knuckles tapped on the plexiglass encasing Janice. It was a chrysalis built for truckers in stasis, which meant she wasn’t on her craft. She had retired, finally, and she was at the blue house. Every trucker had the same choice in retirement packages: a generous pension with the freedom to settle on […]

An Oral History of the American Sacrifice Town

Lauren Bajek (bio) Sacrifice towns? Of course I know about them. Half the runaways I catch, they get caught up in one. That’s their whole promise, isn’t it. When you can’t trust Mommy or Daddy anymore, at least you can trust the magic of the town. Hell, I lived in one for a few years […]

Dreamdead Surrender

123 Simon(e) van Saarloos (bio) “I am trying to find out if Kwati had a dream about me last night,” Lala said, rushed, making up a lie rather than just admitting she was late for no particular reason. “And?” Tommy asked matter of fact. Lala looked into his eyes, trying to figure out if he […]

How to Inherit the Earth: A Primer for Aspiring Futurologists

Rotimi Babatunde (bio) 1. Q Question: This is already inheriting the alphabet What a strange city and what a strange school and what a strange class. Topaz stared at his desk. His mum had said it would be a nice city and a nice school and a nice class, and he didn’t want to be […]

face of the deep

Alexis Pauline Gumbs (bio) Gift to the one who wondered, too verbal to know. Gift to the one who listened. But not for her own sake. _____ We send this transmission in honor of the forgotten one known verbally as John Gibbs Jr. That is not his name. One of many labeled cognitively disabled, non-verbal, […]

Introduction: Post Social Modern Media

Malka Older (bio) Malka Older is a writer, aid worker, and sociologist. Her science-fiction political thriller Infomocracy was named one of the best books of 2016 by Kirkus, Book Riot, and the Washington Post. She created the serial Ninth Step Station on Realm, and her acclaimed short story collection And Other Disasters came out in […]

A Note from the Editors

As a journal of theory and criticism of contemporary cultures, Postmodern Culture has published fiction rarely, in moments when we have sought to recognize creative interventions into conceptual discourse. In the early 1990s, PMC published postmodern fiction by Kathy Acker, Robert Coover, and William T. Vollmann, among others. Issues of PMC have featured poetry by […]

Fernando Vallejo’s El desbarrancadero: Dis/Integration and Care in the Seropositive Latin American Body/Corpus

Diego Falconí Trávez (bio) and Robin Myers (bio) Introduction: Dis/integrations — The Outline of an Empty Signifier1 To address disintegration as the starting point for this text obliges me, firstly and briefly, to reflect on the polysemic and contextual nature of words. To begin, for a signifier, there is almost always a series of signifieds […]

Contradictory Heterofaggeneity as a Critical Cuy(r) Tool in Andean Academic Studies

Diego Falconí Travéz (bio) and Robin Myers (bio) A Brief Theoretical Chronicle of Cuy(r)ness In 2013, the conference Queering Paradigms V: Queering Narratives of Modernity was held in Quito. This was the second time an international academic discussion of queerness had come to Ecuador. In 2012, two colleagues and I coordinated the colloquium Rethinking Queerness […]