If you looked for a textbook definition of a good literary citizen, Michael Wheaton’s name would almost certainly come up. Wheaton is best known for his work as the publisher of Autofocus Books and as the producer for the podcast, The Lives of Writers. He is also a talented essayist, whose debut book, Home Movies, came out in February from BUNNY. Curious about the intersection of writer and publishing, we corresponded over email.

Living in a human body is complex and nuanced. Acknowledging these subtleties is a way of embracing full existence, including life’s enigmas.

They discuss the messiness and double standards that come from talking about gender, sexuality, and eroticism, especially in academic settings.

A sobering reminder that the mountain and the mosquito will be here long after we are gone.

Like some of our literary magazine friends, Barrelhouse recently found out that in our online Gray Issue in 2022, we published some poems purported to be written by a person has turned out to be a serial plagiarist.

It seems the way back for Karrick is a matter of allowing for beauty in every moment, even in what he might initially find irritating or ugly.

I like that a game is not a matter of rules, but of possibility: each board or card or piece gives possibility to beautifully imagined worlds and challenges. I like the ways that games encourage us to work in collaborative metaphors, to create beautiful conflicts to overcome.

An adventurous collection, filled with humor and optimism, Ardor is a future-thinking text.

Measured sentences draw the reader into the emotional dome she inhabits. The book’s even tone avoids associative leaps and instead mirrors the quotidian effort to keep going, day after day.

At night, flesh. Her tits sliding into her armpits, her stomach pushing against the elastic of her panties. The elbow with the dry patch that’s cracking, the crick in her neck. All of her sinking, spilling, oozing into the mattress, sloppy and sweating with a pillow between her knees, an itch on her ribcage she can’t ignore. Her stomach growling, her heart thumping. Meat.

While visiting Bowdoin College, Tony and Meadow walk around the campus. We’re reading together beneath a tree. We’re too old to be in college, but we don’t look like professors either. Our presence is unsettling, a foreshadowing of the daytime murder of Fabian Petrulio, which takes place later in the episode.

We interviewed Holly M. Wendt, author of the novel Heading North, about their path to publication, hockey twitter, and of course Patrick Swayze movies.

Since it’s founding in 2004, Barrelhouse has ended every interview with the same question: what is your favorite Patrick Swayze movie? We’ve asked The Swayze Question, quite literally, to anybody who would talk to us, everyone from Emmylou Harris to Ian MacKaye to Malcolm Gladwell to the Hold Steady.

The Long Form resists reading as a period of sustained focus or unilateral attention, and instead insists on the irreplaceability of life.

Sheila Squillante’s essay collection, All Things Edible, Random, and Odd, forthcoming from Clash Books, is equal parts memoir, celebration of her late father and the love of food that he passed on to his daughter, and exploration of the way these things continue influence her family’s life. We sat down around the virtual dinner table to talk about the book, the difference between writing memoir and essays, poetry and painting, and uncoolness, the Eighties, and of course Patrick Swayze.

His central question: what does being Puerto Rican mean to me now, given that it has meant nothing through most of my life?

The crux of Brookins’ resistance: to find beauty in the fight, and to acknowledge that imagining is good, but having is better.

Realizing that you are driving, or perhaps living, toward an unattainable life fuels the collection’s philosophical musings. 

Elektrik is translation operating as good translation should: as a megaphone for writers who might otherwise remain unheard in the Western canon.

In My Big Little Break, we ask authors to talk about the first piece they ever had published, how it felt to finally break through, and what they’ve learned since then. This week we’re pleased to be speaking with one of the featured authors at our upcoming conference in Philadelphia on September 23, Sara Lippmann.