I was sitting at a long table with a lot of nice things on it. There was a large pitcher of ­water with an ornate handle that looked like it was made of real silver, and there were forks and spoons. 

  I first encountered Lexi Freiman’s work in a workshop at Columbia University. She had written a short story about a woman in a shifting, phantasmagoric relationship with a man whom the narration treated at some times as a nemesis and at others…

  “I make nothing new, create nothing: I’m a sort of mad journalist,” Kathy Acker writes in 1989, on Empire of the Senseless, her fifth book from a major publisher and first venture into the realm of science fiction. At first glance, j…