A book should either allow us to escape existence or teach us how to endure it.

In my own little way, I feel like I'm part of a group of writers who care deeply about pushing the essay forward.

Genre is a minimum security prison.

Our culture is obsessed with real events because we experience hardly any.

I'm wonderfully self-lacerating, probably to my character's detriment. I'm terribly open to critique.

Thomas Jefferson went through the New Testament and removed all the miracles, leaving only the teachings. Take a source, extract what appeals to you, discard the rest. Such an act of editorship is bound to reflect something of the individual doing the editing: a plaster cast of an aesthetic-not the actual thing, but the imprint of it.

The novel is dead. Long live the antinovel, built from scraps.