David Leo Rice is explaining, with apparent sincerity, that the 2020s are a post-Real era in which discourse has so thoroughly swallowed reality that no one notices the gap anymore. He may have a point. In this interview with Danny Elfanbaum, Rice discusses The Squimbop Condition — a book that resists being called a novel, a story collection, or anything else that would make it easier to shelve — and the Brothers Squimbop, two figures of compounding mythological uselessness whose attempts to escape the post-truth trap only wind them deeper in. There is also a theory of male artistic reproduction involving unformed goo. Rice calls what he's doing "necro-modernism." It fits.