Hi Joe, it’s a pleasure to have you here. Your story in this issue, “Eating Bees From The Ass of God”, is suffused with a kind of aesthetically repulsive sexual body horror. Where did the idea for the story come from and is this aesthetic something you consciously wanted to explore? Hi Jonny, thank you…
Category: Issue #1
Issue #1 of Seize The Press Magazine. January 2022
Digital Publishing and the Infinite Now by Kurt Schiller
It should be apparent from even the quickest of glances that online publishing is sick and dying. Not that you would know this from publishing’s centricity to culture, especially on the internet. Google, Facebook, Twitter—the media titans of the modern day depend on digital publishing the way a mill needs a stream. More than 4…
NFTs, Marxism, and Enclosure: The World’s Most Dangerous Fan Club Card by Jess Levine
The most immediate myth to dispel about non-fungible tokens (NFTs) is that they have anything to do with art. The relationship between an NFT and a work of art is much like the relationship between a cereal box-promotion fan club card and the musical artist to which it attests the holder’s unparalleled admiration. The NFT…
Disaster Queers and the Troglodytes Who Mean Them Harm by Eric LaRocca
I’ve often referred to myself as a “disaster queer.” This term is not intended to be self-deprecating, but rather explains my relationship not only with literature but with the world in general as well. Being a queer person, I see the world through a decidedly queer lens. I’m always extraordinarily suspicious of openly queer authors…
“Calamari Soul” by Xan van Rooyen
Toby has been obsessed with squid since we were seven. Said he liked the way ‘cephalopod’ felt in his mouth. I liked the way it squelched through his gap teeth and fell off his lips with a lisping splash. Birds of the sea, he said. I tried to tell him about penguins, but even then…
“Some Seeds Only Bloom After Burning” by Lindsay King-Miller
In the wildfire-ravaged summer, everything disappears behind a haze of smoke: first the sun, then the mountains on the horizon, and then the women. They leave at night or at high noon, following the smell of smoke and the currents in their own blood. Something unnameable carries them toward the hills. In absentia, the missing…
“Shoe Leather” by Edmund Schluessel
Benny came to the city and he’s looking for work. He’s got good strong legs and a straight back and he walks the streets tirelessly, stopping in for every Help Wanted sign. He hobbles over cobbles and clops down the sidewalk and he comes home to his dog, tired, dog-tired, oh so tired ‘cause his…
“Vanishing” by Karlo Yeager Rodríguez
A woman stands at what she thought was her motel door and doesn’t recognize the number. At first, she brushes away the first tingle, light as a strand of spiderweb falling on her nape. All these motels look alike, she tells herself. They’re all cast from the same mold. She should know–they’ve switched between so…
“Eating Bees From The Ass Of God” by Joe Koch, with Joseph Bouthiette Jr.
The old man bends over, bearing a sphincter like the eye of Horus, unblinking. An empty cyclopean gaze surrounded by puckers and hairs. You don’t notice the fragrance. It’s the usual antiseptic. The previous day’s fast combined with laboratory protocols render the client’s anal canal sterile. You have no qualms about the efficacy of the…
From the Editor – Issue #1
Spend any amount of time perusing the dominant short fiction magazines and big awards and it won’t take you long to see the kind of stories that are being pushed right now. They’re didactic and moralising, very often everything is wrapped up in a neat little package with little room for interpretation or further questions….