Classics
William S. Burroughs Fan Letter to Truman Capote, 1970
William S. Burroughs
Truman Capote once famously said of the work of Jack Kerouac: "That's not writing, that's typing." A decade or so later, William S. Burroughs returned the favor with this epistolary riposte.
July 23, 1970
My Dear Mr. T...
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Art
Sensitive Skin Most Best of 2014 More Favorites or Whenever
The Editors
I thought it would be fun to ask some Sensitive Skin editors and contributors what they thought was the best of 2014 - not necessarily the "best of" the year—what they liked best during the year, whenever it came out. So I...
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Evergreen
The “I Love Everbody” Tour Diaries
Maggie Estep
Last year, shortly after Maggie's passing, we published part one of her tour diaries. Here's part two of her adventures with Hole, The Beastie Boys and more, from Sensitive Skin Number 11, which we dedicated to Maggie.
Oc...
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Poem
on the b-38
steve dalachinsky
on the b-38
what are you waiting for / get covered / start here /
a gift of happiness or risky listening?
ya never can tell / drivin 26 yrs / 47 / nice humble guy
surprised / caught a heart attack / here today gone t...
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Story
Lambs to the Laughter
Anonymous
I have the kind of mind that would kill me if it didn’t need me for transportation.
In this case to Ireland.
I had no conscious desire to go anywhere near the place but somehow I found myself sucked into the subway,...
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Story
Afro-Surreal Excerpt
D. Scot Miller
Let me tell you how I met Sham Black.
West Virginia, Dunbar Jr. High School football field, 123rd Annual Commode Bowl, Riverside Rats versus The Hillside Rams.
photograph by Kym Ghee
Every Thanksgiving morning...
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Story
The Year of Our Lord Quetzalcoatl
Margarita Shalina
The morning of the first day in the Dark Zone, I wake, still dreaming in black and white. I am Joan Crawford. I am Mildred Pierce. In the black of night, a storm is raging. I am in a bungalow by the ocean. The white foam wav...
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Poem
Plants at Work
Lynn McGee
Plants at Work
Sunflowers bob on a raft near Chernobyl,
roots leaching atoms humming with intent
to harm, but diffusing like sugar in the slow
surge of some big flower’s stalk,
its face tilting to follow the s...
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Poem
Two Poems by Rebecca Weiner Tompkins
Rebecca Weiner Tompkins
AFTER YOU SAID I ALWAYS LOSE THINGS
The red birthstone fell
out of my ring, leaving
its crowned prongs empty,
a perfect chip chiseled
from my heart’s bones.
I dreamed being stopped by
the long dark walkway
w...
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Essay
Vladislav Khodasevich: Midlife Meltdown in Paris
Jenny Wade
During the unusually hot Parisian summer of 1924, 38-year-old Vladislav Khodasevich—regarded by Nabokov as the finest Russian poet since Blok—was suffering from an identity crisis. One of 3 million exiled from Soviet Rus...
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Story
The Earring
Alan Kaufman
I first saw the gold crescent of renegade freedom dangling from the lobe of a nameless hairy hippy Goy, his scrawny, insolent neck bound by a red bandanna. He leaned with outthrust hip of impertinent American coolness agains...
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Evergreen
Ballad of a Lousy Husband
Joshua Mohr
I should probably tell you more about the night Blue pushed me off the bar because that was really when our marriage ended. Sure, we stayed together another nine, twelve, maybe fifteen months more, but nothing was ever goo...
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Writing
The World of Wrestling
Roland Barthes
The grandiloquent truth of gestures
on life's great occasions.
--Baudelaire
The virtue of all-in wrestling is that it is the spectacle of excess. Here we find a grandiloquence which must have been that of ancient th...
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Story
Caravaggio, Baby
Deborah Pintonelli
I have a date with Henry Henderson. We worked together one long summer canvassing for Greenpeace. Yes, I was one of those annoying young people who stop you on the street when you are rushing to your next appointment. He was...
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Poem
Silent Calls: Short Poems from Sparrow
Sparrow
Silent Calls
You know how sometimes the phone rings and when you answer it no one’s there? Many of those calls are made by cats.
Science Virgin
“I’m a science virgin,” said Adele. “I’ve n...
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