…to James Pelish, sends it off before hurrying to his graduate seminar, grabbing some notes for an abandoned paper on Every Man In His Humour on his way. The class goes about as expected. Most of the students haven’t done the reading, stare at their hands through Paul’s discussion questions. When he tries to riff off his old notes, Lucy… [Read More]

…kind of war with its own casualties raged at home that summer: riots spreading from city to city, domestic combat zones that led to the deployment of 1,700 army troops in Newark and Detroit. Before long, the papers were reporting those dead and wounded, too. For the two months I worked at the VA, I didn’t have a single exchange… [Read More]

…had the patience for caesura, compression, broken lines. It was weird, now that she thought of it, but she’d stopped reading poetry completely after getting stuck in a box canyon in southern Utah. She couldn’t concentrate. That was nine months ago. To say she’d almost been stuck wasn’t quite accurate. She’d been stuck. She was leading the way on a… [Read More]

…conversations with the sole intention of ram-rodding that particular phrase down the unfortunate throat of anyone whom I happened to be engaged with, in what was, up to that point, casual conversation: “So, are you reading anything these days? No? Me? Well, me—lately I’ve been reading this incredible writer named Philip Roth and… I don’t know… I just feel like… [Read More]

If this transmission should find you now continents removed from my last confirmed location, now in your era of no–go glaciers where your people tinder the jungle and marsh–make their tundra and you’re reading this there on your screen porch in the Tropic of Glasgow where you awoke this morning to what seemed at first a loon beneath your pillow… [Read More]

…went back to his apartment. At four-thirty he woke up to the sound of white noise coming from the TV. He turned off the set and stumbled into the bedroom, took off his clothes, and climbed into bed. He felt a small, slightly oily object in the bed. Switching on his reading light, he threw back the covers and found… [Read More]

…I think I knew pretty quickly that she was going to be Japanese-Mexican. It was an intuitive choice that I came to better understand later on. AN: It’s obvious from reading her that she was a lot of fun to write. CG: Yes—I think I have this thing for Amazonian women; there are a lot of them rampaging through the… [Read More]

…kitchen. We’d been on a flight that passed over Ukraine just hours after the Malaysian plane crashed: returning from a trip to Cyprus and Turkey, we were about to leave Istanbul when we heard the news. Once we returned home, I couldn’t stop reading about that Malaysian jet being shot down, thinking about the people who became bodies that fell… [Read More]