About

THE ESOTERIC	THE ABSURD	THE SUBLIME
Hidden. Occult. Secret. Mystical. Unknown.	Meaningless. Chaos. Nonsense. Ridiculous. Paradox. Existential.	Awe. Vastness. Beauty. Terror. Overwhelming. Grandeur.

Kinpaurak was born from the union of Dadaism, Dark Transcendentalism, Southern Gothicism, and Absurdist philosophy.

It comes from Flannery O’Connor’s grotesque grace, Camus’ sun-stroked nihilism, Bataille’s ecstatic horror, and whatever the hell Kafka was going through when he wrote about a guy turning into a bug.

What are we? An institute? A cult? A literary magazine? A fever dream? A thinly veiled excuse to put the words “esoteric,” “sublime,” and “existential dread” in one place? We’re still figuring it out. It’s a space for writing that digs beneath the polite and the presentable, that loves the absurd, the grotesque, the holy, and the unholy.

We like pieces that wrestle with faith and works that interrogate identity. If you’ve ever read something and thought, “this is good, but what if it were weirder, sharper, and a little more likely to be banned in a Catholic school?”—you’re probably in the right place.

Hugo Placer-Sanchez is the current editor-in-chief of Kinpaurak.

why kinpaurak?

It has a meaning. A very big meaning. Huge. Some might say the biggest meaning. People don’t talk about it enough, but it’s there. Trust me.

It’s a ritual on the airplane. First, I close my eyes (pretending like I’m scratching them so no one thinks I’m weird). Then, I imagine a pink aura slowly enveloping the plane—wrapping around the fuselage, stretching over the wings, sealing us in. It’s not something I plan. It just happens. And obviously, if the plane were to fall out of the sky, this bubble would protect it.

Because without it? The plane doesn’t land gently on the ground. It folds. The metal crumples inward, seats snapping off their bolts. Hands fold over tray tables in ways they were never meant to. And I don’t think about that. I think about the pink aura.

I have no idea why it’s pink. Or why I even do this. And that’s exactly why it’s perfect for this magazine.

I took the letters from “pink aura” and scrambled them around until they felt right (I also added a k). That’s how Kinpaurak was born.

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