My favorite classes were always dumb nerdy vocabulary.

I didn’t realize that one tragedy can beget another, and another — bright-eyed disasters flooding out of a death hole like bats out of a cave.

And I do think that great fiction, even when it's comedic, has an urgency or an inevitability to it, a sense that the writer absolutely had to write this particular story in this way.

My favorite classes were always dumb nerdy vocabulary.

For me, the term "literary fiction" means there's always attention paid to language, and linguistic experimentation, sophistication.

I really try to write every day. It's hard, but it's my favorite thing to do. So, it's usually not too, too hard.

At the end of the block where I used to live in Coconut Grove in Miami, there's a swampy area, a no-name alcove with a little mangrove estuary. It's beautiful.