“Sheldon Guterson and Pinchus Fleisher Compared” – Azure (Volume 9, February 2026) “Nine weeks after the death of my cousin, Sheldon Guterson, whose literary fabrications earned him brief notoriety in 1998 and, thereafter, persuaded him to embrace seclusion for nearly two decades, I discovered the following handwritten note in a twine-bound Reebok shoebox he bequeathed me: ‘Dear Ben, You will know that I experienced untold shame at the disclosure of my act of literary deceit and my ensuing professional and financial crash. I don’t believe you are familiar with the entirety of the inciting events, however, and I’m positive you are unaware of their aftermath. Allow me to share…‘”
“Capsule Biography Number 41 – Astrid Vasquez” – Litro Magazine (February 6, 2026) “Astrid Vasquez’s career as a professor of religion at the University of San Carlos of Guatemala has been estimable, though if she is known at all outside her native country it is likely as the accidental catalyst of the proposition that the Anno Domini dating system is padded with three non-existent centuries. According to this implausible theory, championed by an intractable semi-cult based in Andalusia, we currently if unknowingly occupy the 1680s rather than 1988, Charlemagne never lived, and artifacts putatively from the early Middle Ages have been incorrectly dated or are forgeries…“
“Capsule Biography Number 13 – Kjell Garborg” – Lenticular, Issue 4 (Early 2026) “Kjell Garborg, the Norwegian documentary filmmaker, has heterochromia of the eye (his left iris is hazel, his right is blue) and blinks infrequently, creating a fixed and uncanny gaze. Those who engage him in conversation often find the experience unsettling. His 1976 film, Dharma Shock, about the so-called three Buddhas of Savannah, won the National Circle of Film Critics “Best Documentary” award and is often cited as one of the most aesthetically significant documentaries ever made…”
“Capsule Biography Number 26 — Gideon Haarhoff” – The Broken City, Issue 37 (Winter 2025) “South-African born Gideon Haarhoff, who holds no actual professional title (he taught secondary-level history in Liverpool for a dozen years) and prefers to call himself, simply, ‘an investigator,’ is a skeptic of the scientific rather than philosophic strain…”
“Capsule Biography Number 21 – Haruko Wallis” – The Glacier, Issue Four (Winter 2025) “In interviews, Haruko Wallis invariably finds an opportunity to clarify her loathing for music she finds insubstantial. Ralph Vaughn Williams, whose influence on English composers became smothering to Wallis during her early training, was long an object of her nearly indiscriminate scorn. She remains forthright in her disdain for any musician who works outside the serialist mode…“
“Capsule Biography Number 20 – Howard Karminsky” – Gargoyle #12 (December 2025) “The linguist Howard Karminsky has been celebrated widely for his many contributions to linguistic anthropology and semiotics, though he considers his creation of Seidran, a constructed language (or, more precisely, an engineered language) he devised during the early-1960s, his most significant and durable accomplishment. Seidran, which features 36 consonants and 9 vowels, verb inflections derived from a cluster of Pacific coast Native American languages, and a vaguely Ethiopic script, is spoken by no one…”
“Capsule Biography Number 4 – Sunil Murthy” – Rundelania No. 18 (November 2025 Fall/Winter) “Sunil Murthy’s endeavors as an amateur embalmer were the six-decade aspiration of an
autodidact nurtured in secret parallel to his ascent as an influential tea taster. He died last year at
age 86 and was rumored to have stated on his deathbed—in his final words—that he had never
wavered in his concurrence with George Orwell’s assessment that tea should be drunk without
sugar..”
“Capsule Biography Number 11 – Vivian ‘Cliff’ Elvidge” – The Zodiac Review (Fall 2025) “Attorney Cliff Elvidge, who resembles a young Sean Connery, has a classically trim jawline, gentle eyes, and an expression so placid he often appears to be contemplating eternity. That a man so physically appealing served six months in a federal prison for obstruction of justice is difficult to imagine. That he was once the confidant of Richard Nixon seems unfathomable. He claims a reading of Luis de Molina’s On Divine Foreknowledge, undertaken during his term of incarceration, changed his life…“
“Capsule Biography No. 29 – Joost Verschoor” – SORTES 23 (September 2025) “Joost Verschoor, one of two significant philosophers currently living on the island of Madeira (the other is Pierce Walton) was born in the village of Bunnik, in the province of Utrecht, on August 12, 1928. His family moved to Rotterdam when he was four. His earliest formal education was at a school established on the teachings of Rudolf Steiner, where a lifelong appreciation for the power of music was impressed upon him and where he first discovered an intuition for the virtues of Idealism…”
“Capsule Biography Number 9 – Marcelle Leroudier” – Hunger Mountain 32 (July 2025) “In the eighth volume of Le Monde Primitif, published in the late 18th century, French pastor and occultist Antoine Court de Gebelin described the ostensibly ancient Egyptian origins of the Tarot, thus initiating a European fascination with playing cards that elevated them from mere amusement to divinatory tool…”
“Capsule Biography Number 7 – Alvaro Ribeiro” – Funicular 17 (June 2025) “By age 71, Alvaro Ribeiro had translated 37 Portuguese and Spanish novels into English, with an occasional work in French and Italian. He is now 80 and has failed to complete a single translation over the past nine years. ‘I lost all faith in my ability to express an idea–or even a single sentence, even a single word–in a language other than its original,’ Ribeiro said in 1979. ‘In fact, I think the endeavor is impossible. Not just for me. Impossible absolutely, for anyone…'”
“Capsule Biography Number 27 – Ettore Massimo” – Superpresent Summer 2025 “In the spring of 1949, Ettore Massimo, then a young medical intern at the University of Padua, was summoned to the island of Lido (the site of Thomas Mann’s novella of sterile obsession) to examine a 50-year-old Venetian who believed his legs and back had turned to glass…”
“Capsule Biography Number 2 – Ester Tejada” – BlazeVOX25 Spring 2025 “Ester Tejada is a pianist who has claimed she never feels more alone than when she is playing by herself for an audience. It has been over two decades since she last gave a solo performance…”
“Capsule Biography Number 17 – Althea Tamayo” – BlazeVOX25 Spring 2025 “In 1118, the sultan of the Seljuk Empire spurned an overture of amity from Hasan-i Sabbah, the founder of the Order of Assassins, and awakened one morning thereafter to a silent threat—a dagger fixed in the ground beside his bed…”
“Capsule Biography Number 5 – Luisa Guerra” – Burningword Literary Journal, April 2025 “In April of 1968, Luisa Guerra created Eseidra, a board game she says has been played to completion by 11 people over 20 years. This claim has been contested…”