I spent my entire childhood feeling like a freak because I liked to read. It's just like, "Eh, no one else likes to read but me; I must be crazy!"

Usually at the end of each story we're thrown clear out of the story's world and then we're given a new world to enter. What's unique about a linked collection is that it can deliver both sets of narrative pleasures - the novel's long immersion into character-world and the story anthology's energetic (and mortal) brevity - the linked collection is unique in its ability to be both abrupt and longitudinal simultaneously.

For me I was always a smart nerdy kid. I wasn't the smartest and I wasn't the nerdiest, but I was a smart nerdy kid my whole childhood, and I definitely wanted to be somehow involved with reading the rest of my life, and I came from a community, I lived in a community, I was part of a community where reading was considered completely alien.

[Donald] Trump is what happens in America every time it feels economically and politically threatened, and it encounters the limitations of its own white supremacists practices.

I think a lot of the most interesting immigrant writing involves stepping outside of that old, dreary binary. Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker is a great example. Same goes for Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior.

She's applying her lipstick; I've always believed that the universe invented the color red solely for Latinas.

What we [writers] do might be done in solitude and with great desperation, but it tends to produce exactly the opposite. It tends to produce community and in many people hope and joy.