(two) year(s ago) in review
(two) year(s ago) in review (or: RIP cohost)
back when it was first announced or made official that Twitter was being bought by Elon Musk, a lot of people began exploring their options, looking for a place to post that didn’t suck ass.
some of us ended up, briefly, on a site called Cohost. i very quickly realized that Cohost was more like a passable Tumblr clone, whereas I was more interested in a passable Twitter clone, so i only spent a couple months there. interestingly, though, this was before i started the first version of this newsletter, so for a brief while Cohost was the repository for all my little short story recommendations.
I’d pretty much forgotten about Cohost when I received an email saying they were shutting down the site at the end of 2024 and that users should export and download anything they wanted to keep. (I guess a lot of other people had forgotten about it as well.)
So in keeping with part of my avowed mission of “lengthening the half-life” of good online short fiction as much as possible, I’m cracking open this time-capsule and using it as an opportunity to rescue bits of this “year and change in short fiction recommendations” from two years ago, which began thusly:
the end of the year is approaching, and probably the end of other things, so my mind has turned to retrospection
a little over a year ago i started tweeting about random short stories id read that i wanted to share and i'm going to reproduce them here for posterity's sake in case twitter suddenly and definitively shits the bed
Anyway, included were such gems as:
a criminally overlooked story by Karlo Yeager Rodríguez: "How Juan Bobo Got to Los Nueba Yores", a story about immigration and assimilation and the juxtaposition of worlds
one by Andrew F Sullivan, a great story whatever one’s feelings are regarding Wolverine: "Wolverine House"
a couple of stories by Stephen Millhauser who I was getting into just then, such as "A Visit" on the New York Fiction Podcast and another one called "The Slap" which I described as being “like Paranoid Agent, but instead of an anime directed by Satoshi Kon it's a short story written by John Cheever [or someone like that]", a very topical story at the time (remember when Will Smith slapped the shit out of Chris Rock at the Oscars? that was fun)
"The Angel Is In" by Carl Harris about which I said at the time that it “hit a sweet spot of satire and irrealism that i'm always down for, and if you're not familiar with Protean, their website says they produce "cutting-edge print and digital media for the discerning leftist", so if that sounds like your bag, do investigate further”
and there must have been some Omelas discourse going around, as I also recommended "After We Walked Away", a banger from way back in Nov 2016 by Erica L. Satifka
"Propinquity" by Kalani Pickhart - This one in TriQuarterly has neat diagrams!
Seize the Press, a publication very near and dear to me, was just starting at the time and from their earliest issues I recommended: "Vanishing" by Karlo Yeager Rodriguez (“a cold look at the horror of family-separation-as-immigration-policy”, I called it), "Reno Walled City" by Naim Kabir (“a dizzying cyberpunk romance of sorts”), and "Low Tide Jenny" by the great Bitter Karella
"Belly Full of Spiders" by Mário Coelho ("the buffest weird fiction writer in all of Portugal") in Pseudopod
"The Last Wake" by Kathryn Keane in Luna Station Quarterly “the evocativeness and the, er, Irishness of which I enjoyed very much”
"Naked Shark" by Christi Nogle which, as the title strongly implies, is about shark meat and nudity but also as an added bonus the smell of pee, from the first issue of Tales from Between
i also wanted to highlight the now-sadly-departed Lammergeier magazine, featuring the world’s greatest writer June Martin with "Through the Invisible Door", a compelling entry in a genre you might call the "anti-portal fantasy" as well as "Two Stories" by Langdon Hickman ('A Series of 26 True Statements' and 'The Clothing')…
…also Propagule had just published its first issue which I described quite eloquently as “just, wild”
Those were the main highlights, at least. You can go look at the original posts on cohost and see the rest, or you can until the end of December at least
And while such venues as Propagule and Seize the Press are still going strong, you will notice that at least a couple of those mags are no longer publishing, sadly enough. so RIP to them, and RIP Cohost
PS be forewarned that more year-end reminiscences will be forthcoming
PPS also be thankful that Bluesky is perfect and eternal and nothing will ever go wrong there, ever