Of All the Gin Joints is one part cinematic history, one part old Hollywood weirdness, and one part handy basic bar guide, with a dash of romance and more than a few wry twists. Bailey and Hemingway prove themselves very entertaining cultural mixologists.

I am a writer who is definitely working with a specific language and more than English, that language is American. And I work very much in idiom and am very interested in the play of different kinds of rhetoric, whether it is the more high-flown stuff that reeks of age. I love to juxtapose something like that with something more current or urgent. I am always interested not in America by itself, but America as an idea and how that idea has changed over time, in the eyes of the rest of the world and in the eyes of Americans.

Write what you know. Write what you don't know. But most of all, write what you'd rather not know.

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.

I knew I was in the vicinity of a serious lesson, if not about how to live life, then at least how to put some poetry into your craven retreat from it.

Kamby Bolongo Mean River is an original and fearless fiction. It bears genetic traces of Beckett and Stein, but Robert Lopez's powerful cadences and bleak, joyful wit are all his own.

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