Paul Maliszewski

A man takes his son and an out-of-town guest to the museum, and his two selves—father and friend—clash.

A husband sleeps in the basement and schemes about how to outmaneuver his wife at chess, while she may be having sex with a man from Berlin in their bedroom.

His girlfriend had said they needed to talk. It was just like you hear about: the quote-unquote talk.

Paul Maliszewski is one of the strangest, most original people we know and one of just a few living real writers. "Okay" is a short story about a husband whose wife suggests that she have sex with strange men while he watches.

The less the poet wrote, the more books he bought. He was building a library for the person he wished he was. Or so he told himself.

The short stories of Paul Maliszewski are laser-focused and perfectly terse, but they are also enigmatic. Anyone who knows anything about the form will recognize these as ideal traits. Last December, Vice published Paul’s “The...

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, William H. Gass played one part in a wide-ranging debate with the novelist John Gardner. It was an examination into the nature of art, theirs and everybody else’s.