Nick Antosca
Nick Antosca was named our featured author this month
for his short story "Amphibian."
Nick Antosca. 23 years old. Average height and
appearance. Last night he looked out an airplane window for the
first time in six years. He saw his house. The glow of suburban
sprawl is lifeless green and looks like another planet, one made
of light, becoming visible through the black crust of ours. It's
like something hatching.
He wrote a novel called Fires. He was 20 then. Now it
will be published this December, 2006, by Impetus
Press. Impetus Press, which has the attitude, "Fuck commercial
publishing."
Fires. Part of the book involves a boy locked in a basement
for eight years. Also a huge forest fire. Someone wears a kabuki
mask and wanders through a burning suburb. Nick Antosca grew up
in a suburb across from a field with two tired horses. Before the
suburb it was New Orleans, where Nick's dad painted houses and his
mom was an elementary school teacher. Someone dumped their car in
Bayou St. John and threatened to kill them, so they left New Orleans.
Sex, drugs, and violence are in Fires but the book is about
other things, like how to ignore suffering.
Nick Antosca wrote not-seriously for a while. If you write while
you are drunk or high, your writing will be shit. If you write because
you think women like to sleep with writers, your writing will be
shit. One of his shit poems got nominated for a Pushcart Prize,
and it was still shit.
Then he realized he wanted to do this forever because he sometimes
liked how it made him think and feel, but he wanted to write things
that weren't shit, so he wrote Fires. He wrote some short stories
too. They were published in various places. One appears, August
2006, in the inaugural issue of the New
York Tyrant. It's called "Sexual Anthology" and
consists of sex scenes. There are brain tumors, squirrels, screams
from another room, and a lot of detail drawn from things that happened
in the "real world."
Now there is something else he's writing, a thing called Midnight
Picnic.
Midnight Picnic, which has drowning and blackberry picking
and prison rape. And a game of Putt-Putt golf in the afterlife.
Maybe it will never be published because he discards a lot. But
here are two excerpts.
One.
Two.
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