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Aaron Peck
Aaron Peck is the author of The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis and Letters to the Pacific.

Articles Available Online


The Abyss Echoes Back: Judith Schalansky’s ‘An Inventory of Losses’

Book Review

January 2021

Aaron Peck

Book Review

January 2021

Early in Judith Schalansky’s An Inventory of Losses, the narrator describes the way an ancient form of writing survived oblivion. The soft clay tablets...

Book Review

May 2018

Harry Mathews’s ‘The Solitary Twin’

Aaron Peck

Book Review

May 2018

Imagine a small fishing village on the edge of the world. Its inhabitants are progressive and content. The surroundings...

2011   I In 2011 the world ended: I killed myself   On July 23, at 3:29 in the afternoon, my death set out from Catania Its epicentre was my thin, supine body, my three hundred grams of human heart, my small breasts, my puffy eyes, my brain clubbed senseless, the wrist of my right arm draped over the edge of the tub, the other wrist submerged in a grim mojito of mint bubble bath and blood   On July 23, in the full heat of summer, down the dusty steps of my apartment building, oozing downward insidiously like oily, boiling veins of asphalt, my death propagated from Via Crispi 21 through all the neighbouring streets, to the cathedral with its pigeons and shorts-clad tourists, to the Amenano River, which reeks of carrion, and then vanished underground From my central nervous system to the streets of the city centre, from cold to hot, a perfect breakdown from which there is no return Down into the black heart of the lava stone, from the Roman aqueduct to the dirt paths of the Parco Gioeni, overgrown with weeds and littered with empty beer cans, to the scalding steps of the Church of the Santissima Trinità, to the dingy gray faces of saints Peter and Paul outside the Church of Sant’Agata al Borgo From there it shot off to the narrow sidewalks of the Scogliera, a scream in the depths of the sea, a puff of air in the seagulls’ lungs Amidst the noise of the beaches, the sweat, the wafting clouds of deodorant and suntan lotion Geometric under the spray of the shower, brutal down in the drains, down among the cigarette butts, inside used condoms, swirling down, martyred, into the sewers, down into the darkness and shit, tangled up in hair and the tails of passing rats After four hours my body temperature plunged, especially that of my internal organs   First the brain   Then the liver   Then the epidermis   Then the Ionian Sea: it hardened like a fist   At that point my death once again took wing It flew all the way up to Mount Etna, darting among

Contributor

May 2017

Aaron Peck

Contributor

May 2017

Aaron Peck is the author of The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis and Letters to the Pacific.

Gloria

fiction

May 2017

Aaron Peck

fiction

May 2017

Bernard, whenever he thought of Geoffrey, would remember his gait on the afternoon of their first meeting. Geoffrey walked with the confidence of a...

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poetry

August 2013

Poem from fortune: animal spiral

Sarah Lariviere

poetry

August 2013

xi. inside friend friend is not the landscape: to turn into the water wears and deposits rock, time friend,...

poetry

June 2014

Death on Rua Augusta

Tedi López Mills

TR. David Shook

poetry

June 2014

Translator’s Note Death on Rua Augusta is a book I knew I would translate before I had even finished...

Art

December 2013

When We Were Here: The 1990s in Film

Masha Tupitsyn

Art

December 2013

‘I remember touch. Pictures came with touch.’ -Daft Punk, ‘Touch’   In the 1990s, three important pre post-reality films...

 

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