Every week we identify the best-written works of fiction, speculative fiction, or nonfiction from recent releases and shortlists for major prizes. We also publish articles by their authors on prose technique and AI writing, and for paid subscribers the best-written book of the month.
Information about submitting to Auraist is here. Our standards are as high as for our other picks, but if we publish your work, we’ll invite you to answer our questions on prose style.
Please consider completing our reader survey, to help shape Auraist in the future.
‘A prologue, in which I take a psychedelic drug and realize how easily the illusion of self can dissolve, even as the feeling of responsibility lingers’
It was a sweltering, tedious summer, the first summer of the pandemic, when Travis and I decided to go to the West Texas desert to drop acid. Our itinerary did, of course, include things other than taking drugs. We plan a day hiking in Big Bend. We book a Donald Judd–esque gray concrete casita with a view of the Chisos Mountains. We look forward to drinking Modelo and doing crossword puzzles and having morning sex. But lovely as all of that will be, our main purpose is to take LSD.
A friend in Berlin mails me a few tabs taped under a handmade construction-paper collage on the front of a fake birthday card, posted with a bogus return address. The post office has been running slow all summer, the latest outrage from the first Trump administration, and I am relieved when the card arrives in time for our departure.
How do we take responsibility for the people we become, knowing how we are shaped by both biology and experience? How should we respond when people hurt each other - or themselves? And has science made guilt obsolete?
Lady C by Guy Cuthbertson
Iran and the Revolution by Homa Katouzian
From Life Itself by Suzy Hansen
This Dark Night by Deborah Lutz
The Asset Class by Hettie O’Brien
Ghost Stories by Siri Hustvedt
The Fallen by Louise Brangan
My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein by Deborah Levy
Walking Shadow by Greg Doran
The Black Death by Thomas Asbridge
Original Sin by Kathryn Paige Harden
Baldwin by Nicholas Boggs
Monsters in the Archives by Caroline Bicks
How Flowers Made Our World by David George Haskell
Seven Sisters by Veronica Buckley
In Trees by Robert Moor
The Dark Frontier by Jeffrey Marlow
The Wonderful World That Almost Was by Andrew Durbin
Jan Morris by Sara Wheeler
The Evolution of Fire: Essays on Crisis and Becoming by Angela Pelster
George Orwell by Robert Colls
This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clark by Craig Fehrman
Fly, My Darling by Lisa K. Richter
Small Town Girls by Jayne Anne Phillips
True Crime by Patricia Cornwell
The Village on the Edge of the World by Herta Müller
Admitting defeat isn’t exactly encouraged in our culture, is it? Not admitting it in any direct manner anyway. That slumped-shouldered brutalised porny how-did-I-get-here submission to the billionaire parasite class and the sociopathy and depravity of its culture, so pervasive you can hardly see it—that’s fine. That’s precisely what’s demanded of you throughout your life, one long capitulation, deeply denied but also deeply felt, to the message of all parasite marketing and propaganda: Submit.
But not the fully aware type where you just admit to the truth of a personal defect and that you’re screwed.
Which means it becomes even harder to consciously submit and accept that drink, drugs, porn or Twin Peaks: The Return have wrecked your mind and heart and there’s nothing you (alone) can do about it.
Dig in, grit your teeth, try and try again, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, creative visualisation, brisk runs at dawn, Antabuse, solemn promises that if you relapse you’ll skip around Atocha station with a megaphone praising al-Qaeda… all good stuff.
But what if you’ve given them your best go and you’re still relapsing, and too shy for the Atocha stunt, or too hungover, or too suicidal? Might it not be time to accept you’re never going to beat this problem using nothing but your addict’s thoughts? If not, then when might be the time? After five more years? Twenty?
Our archive has over fifty author articles on prose style and AI writing, hundreds of picks from recent releases and prize shortlists, and the best-written books of the century. A paid subscription gives you full access to this archive, and to the best-written book of the month posts, and allows you to submit your own work to Auraist.
Share Auraist: picking the best-written books
Thanks for reading and helping to support fine writing.
Sean McNulty
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.