HILOBROW 3Q2025
By:
September 30, 2025
Here’s what HILOBROW published in July, August, and September 2025.
We’re grateful to our many stalwart contributors, and also to first-time contributors Matthew Hodge, Julian Richards, Maggie Inge, Karlie Flood, Drew Broussard, Emma Tourtelot, Halimah Marcus, Will Hermes, Samuel Shapiro, Adam Snyder, and Adriana Wong.
BEST OF HILOBROW: 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 1Q2025 | 2Q2025 | 3Q2025 | 4Q2025 SNEAK PEEK.
Also see: HYPOCRITE IDLER 3Q2025.
During 3Q2025, HILOBROW published ENDORA YOUR ENTHUSIASM, a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on our favorite… sympathetic villain! Here’s the lineup:
Kathy Biehl on DR. FRANK-N-FURTER | Catherine Christman on ALEXIS CARRINGTON | Crockett Doob on M3GAN | Nick Rumaczyk on AURIC GOLDFINGER | Mariane Cara on MIRANDA PRIESTLY | Trav SD on PROFESSOR HINKLE | Alex Brook Lynn on TOM POWERS | Lynn Peril on ENDORA | Adam McGovern on EDDIE HASKELL | Mimi Lipson on SUE ANN NIVENS | Heather Quinlan on HAROLD SHAND | Tom Nealon on SKELETOR | Matthew Hodge on BARRY LYNDON | Josh Glenn on JOEL CAIRO | Dan Reines on WALTER PECK | Mark Kingwell on HARRY LIME | James Scott Maloy on CLARENCE BODDICKER | Nikhil Singh on LOCUTUS | Carolyn Campbell on CARSON DYLE | Tony Pacitti on DENNIS NEDRY | Gordon Dahlquist on WALKER | Colin Campbell on RUTH LYTTON | Marc Weidenbaum on THE XENOMORPHS | Susannah Breslin on ANTON CHIGURH | Micah Nathan on PATRICK BATEMAN.
Heather Quinlan is the DEFER series editor. She is very grateful to the series’ contributors, many of whom donated their honoraria to Hearts & Bones.
HILOBROW’s Josh Glenn is editor of the RADIUM AGE series of reissued proto-sf adventures from the MIT Press. During 3Q2025, the following titles were published:
- Marietta S. Shaginyan’s Yankees in Petrograd (August 2025, translated and introduced by Jill Roese). “A novel of our time, in which major events succeed each other with purely cinematographic speed….” — Nikolai Meshcheryakov, “Foreword to the First Edition” (1924) | See this title at the MIT Press website.
- Before Superman: Superhumans of the Radium Age (August 2025, edited and introduced by Josh). An anthology of proto-sf stories and novel excerpts exploring the uncanny (and then brand-new) concept of the “superhuman.” | See this title at the MIT Press website.
Exciting projects for Spring 2026 and beyond are also in the works…
We continued to serialize some of Josh’s favorite Radium Age proto-sf stories and novels. Here’s the 3Q2025 lineup:
- Robert Gilbert Wells’ Anthropology Applied to the American White Man and Negro (1905, excerpt)
- W.E.B. Du Bois’ “Princess Steel” (1908–10, excerpt)
- Noëlle Roger’s The New Adam (1926, excerpt), trans. Josh Glenn
- Lillian B. Jones’ Five Generations Hence (1916, excerpt)
- Leslie F. Stone’s “The Fall of Mercury” (1935)
- Leopoldo Lugones’ “Yzur” (1906)
HILOBROW published further installments in the series RADIUM AGE POETRY. Here’s a sampling of the 3Q2025 lineup:
Fenton Johnson’s TIRED | Hirato Renkichi’s MACHINE | Langston Hughes’ I, TOO | Blaise Cendrars’ SPUTTERINGS | Conrad Aiken’s MORNING SONG OF SENLIN | Countee Cullen’s TO LOVERS OF EARTH | Hart Crane’s TO BROOKLYN BRIDGE | Hirato Renkichi’s INSIGHT | Álvaro de Campos (Fernando Pessoa)’s THE TOBACCO SHOP | Farfa’s THE MECHANICAL TRIANGLE.
RADIUM AGE SERIES UPDATES: 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 1Q2025 | 2Q2025 | 3Q2025 | 4Q2025. FULL SERIES INFO.
During 3Q2025, we published two installments in James Parker’s serialized COCKY: THE OPERA.
- ACT ONE, SCENE FOUR. Excerpt:
HOLIDAY HARRY: This old canal, this water unflowing,
turned inky black from too much knowing,
too many drowned bicycles, drowned bones,
death-mosses, soggy dogs, drowned phones,
coathangers and clumps of narcotic kelp
for when you’re beyond all help. - ACT ONE, SCENE FOUR (cont.). Excerpt:
HOLIDAY HARRY: I’ve been feeling a feeling
that’s hard to express.
My reality principle’s
under duress.
Was it something that I said?
Something that I ate?
This feeling I’m feeling
is hard to relate.
Adam McGovern continued to deliver over-the-transom, on-tangent essays, dialogues and subjective scholarship via his monthly-ish series OFF-TOPIC. Here’s the lineup:
- ART OF THE POSSIBLE: FANTASTIC FOUR’s past perfect. Excerpt:
Very uncommonly for blockbuster cinema, it has a sense of delicateness and elegy; we are conscious of the fragility of what the FF are defending, and the film’s themes of societies pulling together and everyone having a say, and the bumpy but navigable route to reconciling those two, are an understanding we long for.
- DEFLECT YOUR ENTHUSIASM: A one-part series. Excerpt:
Noir is consumed with things that aren’t as they seem, but that is a matter of conscious concealment; the genre doesn’t really do metaphor, and neither did late-’60s/early-’70s TV. This may have been what Kolchak the character and Kolchak the show were ultimately up against.
- PLATO’S PLAYSET: MARX’d for life! Excerpt:
Their play value was mystifying, being immobile hard plastic, but at the same time they fascinated as a kind of compact sculpture garden. Only not like those we were used to being bored by on museum fieldtrips, but ones which strove to capture motion and expression rather than monumentalize stillness and emotional repose; animation in the most static of mediums, or maybe the moldable plastic signaled to the manufacturer a fundamental fluidity.
Josh Glenn’s SEMIOPUNK is an irregular series dedicated to surfacing examples (and predecessors) of the sf subgenre that HILOBROW was the first to name “semiopunk.” Here’s the 3Q2025 lineup:
- Don DeLillo’s WHITE NOISE. Excerpt:
Murray finds deep significance in ordinary, everyday events and locations; channel-surfs the TV for signs of “American magic and dread”; and roams the aisles of the supermarket, soaking up “psychic data” (one of the author’s proposed titles for the book) about the coercive and transcendental messages encrypted in product labels.
- R.F. Kuang’s BABEL. Excerpt:
“The power of the [silver] bar lies in in words,” explains one of Robin’s Oxford instructors. “More specifically, the stuff of language that words are incapable of expressing — the stuff that gets lost when we move between one language and another.” Kuang is writing about translation, but of course the ineffable “stuff of language,” which can’t ever be directly known, is also central to the science of semiotics established by Saussure and Peirce.
- China Miéville’s EMBASSYTOWN. Excerpt:
Human language is a medium of signification, of meaning-making. Which, as has been discussed several time in this series, is (for semioticians in particular) highly pleasurable. This helps us to understand why the Hosts, for whom signs have always only offered access to unmediated reality, become dangerously intoxicated when the myriad possibilities of signifier/signified connections are revealed.
This summer, Josh Glenn and Rob Walker’s story telling experiment GIVE IT UP mounted exhibitions of meaningful objects in venues around Kingston… and asked visitors to help persuade the experiment’s subjects to let these objects go. Here at HILOBROW, we helped out by publishing posts introducing GIVE IT UP’s test subjects, as well as cross-posting the subjects’ true object stories.
We also published photos from the project’s September 10th wrap-up party, along with excerpts from the most persuasive responses.
PS: Here’s the GIVE IT UP website / newsletter.
On the 4th of July, HILOBROW friend Mandy Keifetz offered a modest proposal. Excerpt:
What young American men fear most of all is — shame.
It shouldn’t be that hard to convince them that ICE is uncool. We managed to make Teslas uncool in a matter of weeks. (We, just a bunch of middle-aged people with cardboard signs, led by Alex Winter, the poet of stoned benevolence). And while it may be too late to save the concept of checks and balances in our government or to save the 14th amendment, it is not too late to make ICE uncool.
Heroically uncool.
We continued to publish new installments in HERMENAUTICA, a series featuring pages from Hermenaut, a DIY intellectual zine/journal published (1992–2001) by HILOBROW’s Josh Glenn.
NOT TODAY, EBAY continued to share recent examples of stuff that Josh was tempted to purchase from eBay… but, heroically, didn’t.
Josh’s other HILOBROW series include: SCREENSHOTS | PHOTO DUMP
On to 4Q2025…