Michael Valinsky

A man has a look on his face that screams trouble. He wants something from you. He wants you to take your clothes off. He wants you naked. His clothes barely fit. They’re skin-tight and his thickly drawn muscles burst out of every opening. Even the shading is sexy. The man wears leather and, with hands much larger than his face, reaches over to touch you. It’s not like he wants to buy you a drink, he wants to be the drink. Outside the window, more men. Further away, more still. The streets are brimming with them, and beyond are […]

To call novelist Grubisic’s latest work “your typical coming-of-age Rock’N’Roll story” would be selling it short. As readers, we are used to seeing recurring tropes in new adult texts: first love, a rule-breaking adventure, domestic upheaval, or existential crisis. However, they’re often written in comprehensible, syntactically coherent sentences, and plot driven texts. We nod and smile at the moments we recognize and frown at those we’ve pushed far into the depth of our memories. From Up River and for One Night Only is a linguistic brouhaha, lending itself to non-associative devices. These tropes are no longer intelligible; rather, they are […]