It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity.

I moved to New York with the derangement of love. I was writing all these terrible stories, but I had never been happier.

I want a real encounter with something true and disconcerting about peoples' natures.

I do think there's something when you have an unbroken day, and it feels like you and your attention can just be together like birds again and you can actually think and dream a little.

My fingers curl through the holes in the wicker, through the wet grass beneath it, trying to hold tight to the sharp blades of the present. Somewhere in my brain a sinkhole is bubbling over, and each bubble contains a scene from a tiny sunken world ... I have never been the prophet of my own past before. It makes me wonder how the healthy dreamers can bear to sleep at all, if sleep means that you have to peer into that sinkhole by yourself. ... I had almost forgotten this occipital sorrow, the way you are so alone with the things you see in dreams.

Tin House magazine is a port in the storm for people who love language. It is unfailingly excellent, and committed to publishing new voices in addition to delivering freaky-fresh work from established writers.

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