Tim Thornton's portrait of a pop culture obsession is so convincing that one can't help wishing that his fictional alt rock band actually existed, or suspecting that they did. The Alternative Hero is a weirdly compelling portrait of fanatic fandom which reads like High Fidelity at high volume.

Sometimes I think the difference between what we want and what we're afraid of is about the width of an eyelash.

Delia's arms were inscribed with a grid of self- inflicted wounds, an intricate text of self-loathing

It's the cynics who never get married.

Most all of the writers I admired when I was in my teens and twenties died young. Fitzgerald lived the longest. He was 44. Dylan Thomas was 39. And then once you're approaching 40, you suddenly think, "Well, maybe I would like to live longer than Fitzgerald or Thomas."

The 20th century saw far greater catastrophes than September 11th, as bad as it was, and they didn't render literature or art or music irrelevant. In fact, I think that literature and art help us to understand - sometimes they provide narratives and metaphors for understanding history, for understanding recent catastrophes.

I realized that I might not ever make it as a writer, that it might be because I wasn't good enough, or that it might be because the odds were just too long.