There is nothing quite like the controlled burn of Eugene Marten’s prose. Waste is an exhilarating and unnerving piece of fiction.

Atticus Lish is a true original and this is a tremendous book, relentless, moving, written in prose of marvelous integrity. Now that America and the novel are dead, I hope we can have more great American novels as alive as this one.

You think you know yourself, the world. You believe you've got a bead on everybody else's bullshit, but what about your own?

Art is an artifice that you try to make seem natural.

This country was built on the backs of dudes who drank on buses. What we do honors them.

I had a teacher once who said, "If you are going to write fiction, you should only read poetry." I have always been interested in the writers who care about their sentences and who really work on that level. I have always said that I hate writing, I love revision. So, the language is really important to me. And the comedy and the horror that come out of the language.

Everything's weird if you stare at it.