Emir West

It’s MFA grad Palace Bryant’s final 24 hours in art school, and she is not going to the graduation party! She needs to get back home to Chicago from Upstate New York, but that means surviving a hazy, hilarious, and hallucinatory odyssey, stumbling from academic critiques to backseat hookups.

The title draws on Nietzsche’s comment on modernity as an experience of radical relativization in the cosmos: 'Since Copernicus man has been rolling from the centre toward X.' I became less interested in 'X' representing nothing or negativity, and so I made it crooked, with the letter 'K.' Which brought to mind 'being OK' as a state and a goal: we are familiar with oblivion (X), we read about it every day. How to get to 'OK' is a more challenging and interesting problem. There are five em dashes between O and K — a state of abeyance, like living while holding your breath. — Vijay Masharani