There's an enormous difference between normative white masculinity and normative black masculinity.

Hip-hop is mostly what I listen to, other than jazz. I've given up on pop music and indie rock.

That became my aesthetic - a very Chekhovian, American realist aesthetic in the tradition of Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and Tobias Wolff. The perfectible, realist story that had these somewhat articulate characters, a lot of silence, a lot of obscured suffering, a lot of manliness, a lot of drinking, a lot of divorces. As my writing went on, I shed a lot of those elements.

It's only when an American steps outside of their own culture that you see how integral it is.

The politics of transgender identity are really complicated. And the debate over how much of gender is biological and how much of it is socially constructed is a very complex debate.

Black culture is very difficult to explain to people who don't have any direct contact with it.

The impact of black music and black art forms on American culture is really difficult to appreciate.