Everything is cyclical. Historical eras go through times of intense cynicism, broken by periods of intense idealism.

I do like Twitter. Writing is a solitary pursuit, and it can get lonely. I like to go into Twitter for a short period of time, communicate with clever friends, and then switch it off. That's perfect for me.

I see ghosts everywhere, and that is partially a function of my being incredibly near-sighted and reading way too late into the night.

The novella is at once the most elegant and demanding form: a writer must balance the looseness of a novel with the concision of a short story, a feat that only the bravest and most talented of us can manage. In Brazil, Jesse Lee Kercheval proves, yet again, that she is exactly the right writer for the job. A wild American picaresque, Brazil snaps along briskly, yet feels full-fleshed, and brims with a sly wit and grace.

If you look at communal experiments in general for any amount of time, you'll find a lot of horrors: raped children, sexual slavery, eugenics experiments, on and on.

It seems to me that if you were to take almost any half-century in history, you'd find a grand societal tug-of-war between the community and the individual.

Everything is cyclical. Historical eras go through times of intense cynicism, broken by periods of intense idealism.