I’m so proud to announce a killer issue of Mishap! It’s one of his occasional “book issues” where he covers books he’s been reading. But it’s so much more. The introduction is immensely relevant, a bold defense of stories of all sorts talking about how they “define how we act as social creatures” and how all stories need to be analyzed and deconstructed. He goes as far as to say that everything we say is somehow a story, so they define our reality. The dominant fictional story, our culture, is an oppressive and hegemonic one, so there are plenty of smaller stories to back it up. He calls on us to resist these stories. He continues this line of thought in his review of Shaped by Stories and more importantly when he deconstructs Louis L’amour’s Western novels, calling them out for being racist, genocide-supporting, historical revisionism that we accept as fact because we’re so used to hearing it. He says, “Most white people in the U.S. are predisposed to believe all that romantic Old West bullshit, so writers don’t have to try very hard. When a writer taps into these national myths, they don’t have to be accurate or true because we already believe the lies.” He ties that to current times and how we accept so much racism in media and how these myths allow racialized oppression to continue. Brilliant! –Craven Rock (Mishap, PO Box 5841, Eugene, OR 97405)