Aurelie Sheehan's absorbing stories have depth miles beneath their compelling surface. They radiate a wisdom, beauty and originality rare in contemporary fiction.

Someone once told me years ago that there was nothing so dead as a warmed-over love affair.

I think we all recognize that one of the problems in American culture is that increasingly, there's no middle ground. That either you're a celebrity writer or a celebrity poet, or else you're nothing.

Someone said, in a simplistic way maybe, that all American poetry is either cooked or raw, and if it's cooked, it comes from Poe.

If you're not happy, if you're not Emmersonianly happy and think everything's going to get better, then you're just sort of a dark animal.

When you are out of favor, so to speak, it's not just the reviewers. It's the editors, the publishers, they don't want you anymore, you're just gone and you've been written out of history as effectively as the old Stalinists would write someone else out, take their photograph out of a book.

Whether one becomes famous or not, you have to be reminded of people like Melville, who for the last thirty years of his life was completely unknown. He worked in a customs house and walked off to work as an anonymous person in this American culture.