Loner

<h4>Ira Wells is a Toronto-based culture writer and the author of Fighting Words: Polemics and Social Change in Literary Naturalism. He has written essays and opinion pieces for The New Republic, American Quarterly, Popular Music and Society, Canada’s National Post, and elsewhere. Follow on Twitter at @Ira_Wells</h4>

Ira Wells

Teddy Wayne Wasn’t Here

"Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't." — Mark Twain

Fiction

Toy Story: “The Force Awakens” as Nostalgia Gone Terribly Wrong

"There is only one thing that can kill the Movies, and that is education." — Will Rogers

Film

Hotels of North America

The Full-Spectrum Loser

Purity

Mr. Difficult Rejects His Title: Ira Wells on “Purity”

Lucky Alan: And Other Stories

Jonathan Lethem, the Elephant Man

Los Angeles. December, 1941. America stands at the brink of World War II. War fever and racial hatred grip the city.
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The hellish murder of a Japanese family summons three men and one woman. LAPD captain William H. Parker is superbly gifted, corrosively ambitious, liquored-up, and consumed by dubious ideology. He is bitterly at odds with Sergeant Dudley Smith—Irish émigré, ex-IRA killer, fledgling war profiteer. Hideo Ashida is a police chemist and the only Japanese on the L.A. cop payroll. Kay Lake is a twenty-one-year-old dilettante looking for adventure. The investigation throws them together and rips them apart. The crime becomes a political storm center that brilliantly illuminates these four driven souls—comrades, rivals, lovers, history’s pawns.
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Here, Ellroy gives us the party at the edge of the abyss and the precipice of America’s ascendance.&nbsp;Perfidia&nbsp;is that moment, spellbindingly captured.

Perfidia

Epic Noir

"The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter, eh?" — Dashiell Hammett

Noir

Last Stories and Other Stories

Freaks and Geeks

The Facades

Death of the Black-Haired Girl

The Flamethrowers

The Yellow Birds

<h4>Geoff Mak is a writer who lives in New York and Los Angeles. His literary features have appeared frequently in Forbes and Flavorwire. He has recently completed his first novel.</h4>

Geoff Mak

<h4>Ryan Bubalo lived in Sulaimaniyah, Iraq, from 2008-2010. He taught English and helped design the Academic Preparation Program at the <a href="http://auis.edu.iq/">American University of Iraq-Sulaimani</a>. He also coached the university's first women's basketball team, which was featured in the award-winning documentary <a href="http://www.salaamdunkfilm.com/">Salaam Dunk</a>. He currently lives in Seattle and is finishing his own Iraq war novel entitled Time of Our Choosing.</h4>

Ryan Bubalo

<h4>Alizah Salario is a journalist and essayist. Her work has appeared in Slate, The New York Times, The Washington Post, at the Poetry Foundation, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn.</h4>

Alizah Salario

FICTION: NEW & NOTEWORTHY

The Departed

Ira Wells is a Toronto-based culture writer and the author of Fighting Words: Polemics and Social Change in Literary Naturalism. He has written essays and opinion pieces for The New Republic, American Quarterly, Popular Music and Society, Canada’s National Post, and elsewhere. Follow on Twitter at @Ira_Wells