The Libertarian Opposition is Rising…
T. S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men and Sean Dempsey’s America, 2023 both confront the spiritual and moral decay of civilization, but they do so from opposite emotional poles. Eliot’s poem is elegiac: a whispered lament for a world hollowed out by inertia and disillusionment. His “stuffed men” drift without agency, trapped in the shadow between […]
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 […]
By Sean Dempsey John awoke with a start as his bedroom door was kicked open. In a blur of confusion and panic, he found himself dragged out of bed by burly Policemen who blindfolded and transported him, half-naked, to a parked car. It sped off into the night immediately. At last the vehicle stopped and […]