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Posted on April 6, 2020 Leave a Comment
In a sparse and beautiful page-long prologue, we encounter a violent act against Kayden Kelliher, a 17-year-old Geshig High School basketball star. His death, brought on by gang violence and communal depression, haunts the town in this story of violence, redemption, and self-determination.
The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy
Posted on February 9, 2020 Leave a Comment
We are lucky to live in the world of Deborah Levy.
Posted on November 26, 2019 Leave a Comment
We don’t always know what intimate life consists of until novels tell us.
Posted on November 24, 2019 Leave a Comment
Maybe stories, fiction or not, give solace, context, possibility, as much with their stable, recurring forms as with their infinitely various contents, and thereby produce examples of lives shaped, framed so they are recognizably distinguishable from emptiness, from darkness that seems always to surround and render lives unseeable.
Posted on October 2, 2018
Now that that organism has, for good or ill, its own self-sufficient equilibrium, why should I entrust myself to the media? Why continue to mix its breath with mine? I have a well-founded fear that the media, which, because of its current nature, that is, lacking a true vocation for “public interest,” would be inclined, carelessly, to restore a private quality to an object that originated precisely to give a less circumscribed meaning to individual experience.
Posted on September 4, 2018
the universal needs the singular, and the singular must contain the universal. If you can put yourself in it, the labels fall away and it becomes art.
Posted on June 26, 2018
We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric,
but out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
Posted on June 25, 2018
Style is not merely decorative or ornamental, any more than are feathers on a bird. Style performs work. Whatever its loveliness or ostentation, it is what allows the creature to fly, to attract mates, to hide from predators, to be what it is. Those feathers, moreover, are only as good as the wings they fit to, and the beak and claws to which they are indirectly joined, and all the rest. The parts have to connect; they have to work as a whole. Getting them together is what makes good writing.
Posted on June 20, 2018
For me, writing is a way of struggling through the intricacies of an anti-empirical sensibility. And there must be words other than fiction and nonfiction. I see fiction not as the construction of an alternate world but as what your imagination gives you from the real world.