Mark Haskell Smith is the author of Heart of Dankness: Underground Botanists, Outlaw Farmers, and the Race for the Cannabis Cup, Baked, Raw: A Love Story, Blown, and other books. His latest is Rude Talk in Athens: Ancient Rivals, the Birth of Comedy, and a Writer’s Journey through Greece (Unnamed, 2021). He is an associate professor in the MFA program for Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts at the University of California Riverside, Palm Desert Graduate Center.
CONTRIBUTOR ARTICLES
Patriotic Obscenity: Aaron Poochigian and the Comedy of Aristophanes
Mark Haskell Smith talks Athenian rudeness with Aaron Poochigian, translator of “Aristophanes: Four Plays: Clouds, Birds, Lysistrata, Women of the Assembly.”...
Gush. An Appreciation.
Let us embrace sensuality: to gush, to splatter, to be enthused....
Writing in Megacities
Dhaka-based author Saad Z. Hossain ambles around Los Angeles with local author Mark Haskell Smith as they talk about writing in their respective cities....
Big Cheese: Michael Paterniti's "The Telling Room"
Michael Paterniti falls in love with a cheese, or rather with the idea of this cheese, because he goes for years without tasting the creamy insides of his beloved queso....
Always Raining: On Deborah Levy’s “Swimming Home”
DEBORAH LEVY’S NEW BOOK Swimming Home is constructed like a play — with a central stage and a cast of characters, ...
Video: David Mitchell
Mark Haskell Smith on the flawlessness of David Mitchell....
The Ghost of Books: Past, Present, and Future
"The Ghost of Books: Past, Present, and Future" is an experiment not in terror and not necessarily Dickensian....
Half Termite, Half Elephant
A shotgun blast of multitentacled musings, it splatters the author's obsessions across the cultural landscape...
Year of the Fire Cock
The book is so unrelentingly erotic and explicit that it could, if you're not careful, cause chafing....
