Dominican men are told to look at women all the time, but they're definitely not told to see them.

Poor Oscar. Without even realizing it he'd fallen into one of those Let's Be Friends Vortexes, the bane of nerdboys everywhere. These relationships were love's version of a stay in the stocks, in you go, plenty of misery guaranteed and what you got out of it besides bitterness and heartbreak nobody knows. Perhaps some knowledge of self and women.

We're accepted as long as we conform to what we are expected to be, and I'm sure that's not any different for anyone else.

Anger has a way of returning.

We know story collections end when they end, as well - the pages serving as a countdown - but nevertheless the standard story anthology hews closer to what makes being human so hard: it reminds you with each story how quickly everything we are, everything we call our lives can change, can be upended, can disappear. Never to return.

I never hear white writers get asked, 'Do you worry about how you represent white people?'

Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can't exist without one.