February 14, 2021
Every reader is a victim and a bully.
February 14, 2021
Every reader is a victim and a bully.
December 3, 2020
Is it from your life? Did this really happen?
To me, a sentence that serves as a purely functional join in the syntax of the novel, like “They drove towards the building,” is as much hard work, and requires as much attentiveness, as a sentence like this one from Afternoon Raag, my second novel, in which the narrator is describing his mother’s hair: “It falls in long, black strands, but each strand has a gentle, complicated undulation travelling through it, like a mild electric shock or a thrill, that gives it a life of its own; it is visually analogous to a tremolo on a musical note.” I don’t consider “They drove towards the building” easier to write than that sentence from Afternoon Raag. If anything, it’s more difficult.
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The act of discernment is not merely punished; it’s made infelicitous.
September 7, 2020
People are always accusing me of living in the n+1 office. Did I live there?
Lizzy Harding, Juliet Kleber, Mark Krotov, Dani Oliver, Rachel Ossip, Francesco Pacifico, Kaitlin Phillips, Stephen Squibb, Will Weatherly
September 7, 2020
I can’t help but hope for some other, better New York.
Lisa Borst, A. S. Hamrah, Judith Levine, Nicole Lipman, Emily Lyver, Elias Rodriques, Dayna Tortorici, Molly Walls, Eric Wen
September 1, 2020
There are writers who should not be allowed to vanish and go silent for so long, much as they might prefer to do so
It was the wrong moment in American letters to be a gay, Black man writing about the South. It didn’t matter if you could write a sex scene of the kind that would, twenty years in the future, earn Garth Greenwell a national book award nomination, while also channeling the blues cadences of Alfred Murray. If you weren’t Toni Morrison or, on the mass market side, Terry McMillan, you weren’t anybody. Publishing had no room for a diversity of diversity.
July 27, 2020
or, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to a Review of a Kierkegaard Biography
I listened to music and podcasts. I called my sister; I called my friend Anika. My wife called me every hour or so to check in. I missed my dad. He was always the guy to call on a long drive—time was the one thing he had heaps of, sitting home depressed all day, and he loved to give it away to whoever wanted it. He was perhaps the greatest talker—but also listener—I have ever known.
Fucking society!
The pandemic had lifted up the rotting log of philosophy, and the philosophers were wriggling about in the sunlight.
April 17, 2020
The bored hours spent in quarantine feel nothing like the bored hours I spent as a kid.
March 19, 2020
I take a lot of pleasure in our correspondence.
March 12, 2020
Lisa Borst, Sarah Gale, Nicole Lipman
Report from AWP 2020
AWP 2020, sparsely attended compared to the usually robust turnout in years’ past, was spread out on a soft teal green carpet that looked a little like grass. Rows of bright white tables, some empty, others covered in books and candy and tote bags, formed aisle after aisle. Planted in the middle of the broad avenues, where guests wandered, dazed or determined, were old-timey benches presumably for guests to sit and read under the fluorescent lights.