I bought an energy bar, and as I ate it a great weariness came over me.

The translator has to be a good writer. The translator has to hear music too. And it might not be exactly your music because the translator needs to translate the music. And so, that is what you are hoping for: a translator who gets what you are doing but who also gets all the ways in which it won't work in the new language.

The place resembled a new model prison, or one that had achieved a provisional utopia after principled revolt, or maybe a homeless shelter for people with liberal arts degrees. The cages brought to mind those labs with their death-fuming vents near my college studio. These kids were part of some great experiment. It was maybe the same one in which I'd once been a subject. Unlike me, though, or the guinea pigs and hares, they were happy, or seemed happy, or were blogging about how they seemed happy.

When a translator translates my book, it is no longer just my book. It is the translator's book, too. So the book in another language is almost the work of two people. And that is quite interesting to me.

No emotion or insight is too small to inflict on the world. Let it all fly. Don't let it eat you from the inside.

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.

I felt as though I were snorting cocaine, or rappelling down a cliffside, or cliffsurfing off a cliff of pure cocaine.