Paul Constant

Tag: fiction

  • A Fifty Year Sentence

    By the time my next newsletter arrives in your inbox, I will be 50 years old. I know some people who hate aging and getting old, and that’s always felt so hopeless to me. You might as well try to win a fistfight with the ocean.

    In fact, I’ve always felt good about aging. When I was a kid, I desperately wanted to be a grownup. When I was in my 20s, I wanted to be a stable adult. I loved being in my 30s and I loved my 40s even more. Obviously, at some point aging becomes a game of diminishing returns, but for now I’m enjoying myself. 

    I don’t like to make a thing about my birthday, but 50 feels like something that should be observed. Kurt Vonnegut wrote Breakfast of Champions as he was turning 50 as a way to ball up all the childish thoughts in his brain, throw them away, and start fresh. Based on his later work, that plan didn’t succeed—he was just as obsessed with sex and death and absurdity at age 51, 52, and so on. 

    But I think Vonnegut’s idea was a worthwhile one. All those memories you carry around with you for decades start to get heavy. I don’t have the time or the talent to write a Breakfast of Champions. I’d like to build a little balcony in my mind so that I can ball up all the elementary school embarrassments and ancient advertising jingles and throw them off it, into thin air. The past gets heavy after a while and I’ve got a craving for weightlessness.

    I’ve Been Writing

    For the Seattle Times, I wrote about Paper Pushers, a new zine pop-up store in the heart of downtown Seattle. It’s run by three young artists, and they have a lot of big plans for the space during the six months or so that it’s open. 

    I also wrote about 13 of the best paperback releases in the month of May. 

    I’ve Been Reading


    I enjoyed Seattle writer Olivia Waite’s second Dorothy Gentleman sci-fi mystery novella, Nobody’s Baby, more than I enjoyed the first installment in the series. While Murder By Memory had to establish the generational starship and its cast of characters, Nobody’s Baby could just dive right into the story. It’s a cracking good yarn about a baby who’s born on a starship where the entire population is on birth control to prevent overcrowding. And while there is a mystery at the heart of the story, it’s also interesting to explore the impacts of a child born in a purposefully child-free society. 

    Emily Jane’s Mr. Yay is an enjoyable novel about a hip-hop group that names themselves after a children’s entertainer who doesn’t seem to exist. It starts as an amusing novel about burnouts and transforms into a gentle sci-fi epic. 

    Automatic Noodle is Annalee Newitz’s entry into the cozy sci-fi category, a short novel about robots who open a noodle shop in a post-second-Civil-War future California. I liked the book but found myself wondering if it would have hit me even more if it were just a realistic novella about a group of friends opening a noodle shop. The sci-fi trappings were interesting, but I think I might have felt more emotionally connected to more finely wrought realistic characters. 

    Transcription is just such a hyper-realistic novel, and it really worked on me. Ben Lerner’s novella is about a journalist whose phone breaks hours before an important interview. It’s a meditation on technology and how it shapes us, and it’s a delightful quick audiobook experience—the book only runs four hours and it feels like a one-man monologue read by a charismatic actor. 

    Did you know Oprah is still picking book club titles? Bruce Holsinger’s novel Culpability has that O right on the front cover, and it’s the kind of contemporary novel that’s always appealed to the Oprah brand—a social novel that explores the impacts of a trend ripped from the headlines. In this case, the book is about artificial intelligence from AI friends to self-driving cars, and while the book opens with a bang, asking some of the most important questions of our time, it ultimately runs out of gas about halfway through and then just sputters to a stop. 

    How Can I Miss You If You Won’t Go Away?

    If I were forced to offer political advice to Donald Trump to help overcome his historically low approval ratings, my advice would be simple: shut the fuck up and disappear for a while. In a hyper-partisan environment like this one, any president’s polling numbers are likely to bounce back to something like 40 or 44 percent if they can just get the spotlight off them for long enough.

    But our president is a deeply broken person who compulsively dives for the spotlight. He literally can’t help himself. And so his approval ratings keep plummeting—as low as 30 percent on his economic performance, which is basically his floor. A full third of the American people wouldn’t hold a negative opinion of Donald Trump if he personally foreclosed on their homes.

    I don’t know where we go from here. The economy is likely only going to get worse. Ordinarily that would result in a massive swing in the midterm election, but the Supreme Court’s shameful decision to allow racist gerrymandering means that the midterms are probably not going to result in as significant a swing as they should. 

    It’s been over ten years since the media began its sick fascination with Donald Trump and I am so tired. I’m sick of hearing about him, I’m sick of living with the unending parade of shit that he’s foisting on us, and I’m sick of watching virtually every powerful institution bend to his will without putting up a fight. 

    The bad news is that we’re all stuck in a weird psychosexual relationship with a narcissist, and there’s no end in sight. The good news is that thanks to Trump’s abysmal polling,I know I’m not alone. There’s a little bit of comfort in that—knowing that across the country, hundreds of millions of Americans shake their heads and make a little tsk noise out of the corner of their mouths and mutter “that fuckin’ guy.” 

    More Americans now fear for the future of the economy than at any time in the history of polling. President Trump has responded by publicly fretting over the type of marble used on ballroom floors and the proper blue shade of a reflecting pool. He’s even more that fuckin’ guy than ever. 

    I have never in my life seen any public figure’s name come closer to transubstantiating into a curse word. I believe that with a little bit of effort and a whole lot of his trademark cluelessness, Donald Trump can permanently befoul his legacy and elevate himself into a generational laughing stock and object of scorn. If anyone can do it, Donald can.

    Thanks for reading! See you in a couple of weeks.

  • What I’ve Been Reading and Writing: September 2025

    What I’ve Been Reading and Writing: September 2025

    Hi!

    Slightly different format this month, starting with three random points:

    1. I’m thinking about changing the frequency of this email, from monthly to biweekly or weekly. It would still be free, of course, but each individual email would be a lot shorter rather than one big one at the end of the month. I sometimes miss the cadence of blogging and being able to write about something immediately—writing shorter pieces about politics, movies, news, art, Seattle stuff. I’m curious what those of you who receive this email think about that. Too much? Don’t mind? Let me know if you have any opinions.
    2. For you poets out there, I wanted to let you know that the excellent crew at Expedition Press will open submissions to their broadside contest from October 1st to 31st. The winner will receive 20 letterpress broadsides of their poem and $100 cash. I’m sharing this because Expedition Press does gorgeous work printing literary works by hand, and even if you’re not a poet you should be aware of them. 
    3. And you should get excited for this year’s edition of the Short Run Comix Festival, which features comics and art from around the country and the world. This year’s festival happens on Saturday, November 1st, and it will be Short Run’s first outing in a new venue: The Seattle Design Center in Georgetown. You can learn about riso printing, watch some hand-drawn animation, and even hear from the Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist Ann Telnaes, who recently resigned her job at The Washington Post after they axed one of her cartoons that was mildly critical of Post owner Jeff Bezos. This is, for my money, continually the most important (and fun) arts festival in Seattle, and I’m excited to see how it grows and changes in its new home in Georgetown.

    I’ve Been Reading

    Seattle author G. Willow Wilson’s latest comic with artist M.K. Perker, The Stoneshore Register, is a quiet little masterpiece. It’s about a young journalist who gets a job writing at a tiny newspaper in a coastal Washington state town where weird things happen. It’s a perfect mix of Our Town and Twin Peaks, and a hopeful refugee narrative. It’s right up there with my favorites of Wilson’s work.

    Ken Bruen’s The Guards is about a disgraced alcoholic former police officer in Ireland who tries to become a private investigator, even though Irish law doesn’t recognize private investigators as a thing. The mystery in this book takes a back seat to the protagonist’s beautiful observations about addiction and depression—a lyrical and funny and thoroughly Irish novel. I loved it and I’m looking forward to reading more in the series.

    Jordan S. Carroll’s short book-length-essay Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right got my attention when it won the Hugo Award earlier this year. It’s a scholarly work that looks at the close relationship between white supremacy and science fiction, and it just may forever change the way you think of the genre. 

    Celine Saintclare’s Sugar, Baby is a novel about a poor young woman who begins flirting with and dating wealthy older men in exchange for favors. It’s a sharp and sad novel about class, power, and sexuality.

    My favorite thing about Richard Russo is that he writes amazing smartasses. Unfortunately, there aren’t any smartasses to be found in his novel Chances Are. Instead, it’s the story of three young men and their friendship with (and lifelong obsession over) a young woman who disappears soon after they graduate. It’s a very readable novel, but I missed the wiseass spark that Russo brought to his novels Empire Falls and Nobody’s Fool.

    Gifts of the Crow is a super-interesting book from local authors about crow behavior, but in the decade-plus since it’s been published a lot of its most interesting factoids have been chopped and channeled and shared on the internet, so it felt like I had read about 65% of this book already.

    William Sloane wrote two short novels of Lovecraftian cosmic horror. They’ve been collected under one cover by the New York Review of Books and titled The Rim of Morning, with a new introduction by Stephen King. Unfortunately, these are hardly lost classics. Sloane slowly builds the terror in his stories and then fails to pay them off in any meaningful way, resulting in one long build to nothing much at all.

    On vacation this month, I embarked on my annual re-read of Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book, a collection of short scenes about a grandmother and her granddaughter spending a bittersweet summer on an island off the coast of Finland. It’s an incredibly special book for me, and I always find something new in it every year. This year, the sequence that most stood out for me centered around a filthy old semi-haunted bathrobe. The week that I read The Summer Book, a movie adaptation of the book starring Glenn Close opened in a few theaters. I’m still not sure if I’m going to watch it or not—I think my relationship to the book is strong enough that my relationship to the characters won’t be changed by seeing them onscreen, but I’m not entirely sure I want to risk it.

    I’ve Been Writing

    My bookstore profile column this month focuses on Haunted Burrow Books, a horror-centric bookstore on Capitol Hill. It’s in a temporary space that’s planned to be torn down, so the future of the shop is uncertain. But I hope it picks up enough fans in the meantime to ensure its continued survival.
    I wrote about the most interesting new-in-paperback debuts for the month.

    And I also interviewed RF Kuang, who’s one of my favorite young authors, about her very funny new dark academia novel Katabasis. She was so smart and forthcoming in her conversation with me. She admitted that her novel Yellowface was probably too mean—it was written during the pandemic, when she mostly was seeing the world through Twitter scrolling—and that she would probably never write another book like it again.

    In one part of the conversation that didn’t fit in the published piece, Kuang also explained why she hasn’t taken to Bluesky in the same way that she used to post on Twitter. “People just aren’t as funny on Bluesky,” she explained. “When Twitter was funny, the humor was amazing. People could be hilarious on Twitter. There’s just not a public commons where people can be that funny anymore.”

    She also talked about art that’s in conversation with her latest book, including the movie Whiplash and the novel Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.

    Kuang also gently corrected me when I referred to the protagonist of her novel The Poppy War as a hero. “I just don’t really believe in singular heroes, solving widespread social problems,” Kuang said. “I think it takes collective action and a tremendous amount of solidarity” to make lasting change, “and that is antithetical to this very neoliberal idea of the singular hero.”

    This is something I’ve wrestled in with my few attempts at writing fiction—the idea of one person changing the world has always felt hollow and childish to me, and maybe that’s why Kuang’s fiction appeals to me on such a fundamental level. She’s struggling with real ways to change the world in her novels, and as I age that becomes, more and more, my favorite kind of fiction.

    That’s all for this month. Maybe I’ll see you a little sooner than next month. I hope you’re doing well.

    Paul