Beautiful and Terrible as the Cheesecake Factory

So, in terrible news, Trump's trying to pull some strings to pass this massive internet censorship bill, featuring all the kinds of internet censorship we're terrified of, including mandatory ID for accessing basically any website, specifically to crush state regulation of AI, because apparently this man will always see the moral bottom of the barrel and start digging.

6/14/2026

if we can count comics, Moore's Promethea too, one of the volumes is a trip around the Tree of Life, i think the whole narrative can be mapped on the Tarot Majors too

Mark Danielewski's Only Revolutions is a book length prose poem that you read from the ends in to the center. i haven't gotten through it but respect the ambitious structure

i feel like Hal Duncan's Vellum & Ink had something interesting structurally between them but i don't think i finished them, specifically bc i waited too long to start Ink after Vellum & got completely lost

Honorable mention/not sure if it counts but the language was interesting enough that I'm tempted to include it: The Tide Will Erase All by Justin Hellstrom is an Improbability Drive-style apocalypse told by a ten(?) year old but might also be a radio/satellite announcement of their story after the fact? needs a revisit

OH SHIT Koji Suzuki's Ring Cycle. Ring is a horror novel that happens on an entirely different level of operation than what we find out about it on Spiral & Loop

Jeff Vandermee's Dead Astronauts, i actually don't know how to describe what he did with it but it's nuts

Blake Butler's There Is No Year is decidedly nonlinear, bordering on nonsensical, with upsetting vibes and such perfect pacing that I couldn't put it down

Matt Bell plays in this territory a lot; pretty much anything by him is going to be fighting you back a little but my introduction was the short story "The Cartographer's Girl"

John Elizabeth Stintzi takes a pretty oblique approach to structure in Vanishing Monuments and, I understand, in My Volcano. (Disclaimer: they are also a friend of mine, but I make the recommendation in earnest)

The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins is like if Warren Ellis tried to write House of Leaves, and I mean that as a compliment

I'm sure you're aware of Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez, but it is, in fact, all that and a bag of chips, especially in its structure

Monica Ojeda does some fun things with structure, especially in Nefando but definitely also in Jawbone, though I'll note that Nefando especially deals in some very dark territory

Steven Millhauser's short stories are pretty distinctly nonlinear and often outright weird in a very fun way -- I love his collection The Barnum Museum, notably the source of the short story that inspired the movie The Illusionist

I feel like Ayse Papatya Bucak's The Trojan War Museum fits here, but I also just feel like that collection is underrated, so cum grano salis

I think the movie is better-known, but Laszlo Krasznahorkai's Satantango is formally and topically very weird in a way that I found delightful

The Bridge by Iain Banks

and

Marabou Stork Nightmares by Irvine Welsh

(both have the dude in a coma)

See Under: Love by David Grossman. It's in four parts, two of them are straightforward lit fic, one is salmon point-of-view, if I recall correctly, one is a story told in dictionary definitions.

And short stories:

Stet by Sarah Gailey (the story emerges from the footnotes)

1-2-3-4-5-6-5-4-3-2-1

The stories leave off, sometimes mid-sentence, and resume later in the book, while working forward in time from the first story that's an Age of Sail story until the 6th one, the only one not interrupted, is in the far post-apocalyptic future. Then each story is resolved in reverse chronological order.

Arcadia by Iain Pears is intended to be read in basically whatever order the reader wants and was originally developed as an app to facilitate this.

It can be read vertically down each character's string or horizontally across all characters in chronological(ish) order. The characters are grouped across three locations: Willdon, Oxford, and Mull, so it's also possible to read geographically.

It's a fun romp, and it was especially cool to see such an experimental style applied to a story that is essentially mid-20th century English genre fiction pastiche. Like, it's not the deepest example of weird fiction I've read, but it was nostalgic while still being self aware that a lot of these mid-century fantasies are kinda nightmarish, and the structure bends in on itself in a satisfying way.

...Tragically the physically published novel is arranged in a conventional manner AND cuts a significant chunk of material, including entire POV characters! This is really dumb to me, because there was an obvious way to adapt what the app's "strings" were doing:

Order the chapters chronologically (horizontal in the app). The first chapter lets readers choose which character to follow (as in the app).

2. Add a line at the end of each chapter to the effect of "The Teacher's Tale continues page ##"

There. Now anyone could enjoy this weird little book without needing an iOS app 😑

The police ruled it a suicide. The family and local community demanded an investigation. The police refused to change their ruling.

Juliana Nzita, A 16 year old Black girl, was just found hanging from a tree on church grounds in Charlotte, NC. Police have ruled it a suicide, despite hanging ourselves from trees being like the one communally agreed way Black folks ain’t killing ourselves.

Every time I go on Twitter or Facebook I learn about another recent lynching or missing Black person going mostly unreported. Half the reason I keep an active account on either of those sites is because they’re the only place I can find out about the violence happening to Black and Trans people reasonably quickly.

To’Nea Nicole Miller, Justice Kai James, and Jerard “Jay” Jackson have all been found hanging from trees this year alone, and have all had their cases ruled a suicide by the police. Just a few days ago another (currently unidentified) Black woman was found hanging from a tree in Jackson Mississippi, although the police havent ruled it a suicide yet.