Sean Dempsey’s short story “Justice” (which is an extract from his 2022 work “A Sad Collection of Short Stories, Cheap Parables, Amusing Anecdotes, & Covid-Inspired Bad Poetry”) works best when read not as a replacement for Kafka, but as a narrowing of Kafka’s nightmare. Kafka gives us the whole disease. Dempsey gives us the moment […]
Terrorists: What the bigger army calls the smaller army.
By Sean Dempsey For roughly two centuries, enlightened man was vainly assured that religion was simply a childhood illness from which civilization would eventually recover. God, so we were told, had served His temporary function. He had frightened the peasants into behaving, decorated the ceilings of Europe, inspired a tolerable amount of organ music, and […]
