Posts by author
Bryan Washington
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Little Traveler
In support of his new memoir, Little Failure, Gary Shteyngart’s been touring the country. Lucky for us, he’s keeping a journal: Philip Roth, in a 2000 interview with David Remnick in the pages of this magazine, speaks about the declining number…
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Another Story to Guide You
Over at the New Yorker, Etgar Keret and Sayed Kashua continue their conversation: I believe that this despair is temporary, and that even though there are quite a few political elements that would rather see us despairing, and even though it…
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Steady Dissonance
Teju Cole’s got a penchant for prose that lingers; over at The New Inquiry, he delivers once again: When I have a nap or something, J.D. said, and I fall asleep (these words in English, all of a sudden, and…
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A Story to See You Through
Etgar Keret and Sasha Kayua have had a pretty busy year: after speaking out against Israeli intolerance, and getting snubbed on every front, the pair turned to penning their viewpoints to each other. The New Yorker‘s published a few of…
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You Don’t Finish Anything, You Just Turn Away
Over at Granta, Sam Lipstye and Diane Cook chat about spontaneity, artistic permanence, and how time travel’s actually a bit of a burden: I would love to make minor adjustments to most of the sentences I’ve put out into the…
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Slowly Becoming
Roxane Gay speaks out on ‘black ambition’ at VQR: I have come to realize how much I have, throughout my life, bought into the narrative of this alluring myth of personal responsibility and excellence. I realize how much I believe…
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Letting Him Go
When Jason Molina passed from the early-indie scene, he took a litany of musical progress along with him. Luckily for us, Max Blau took notice; down by the Chicago Reader, he gives us the profile of an artist for our…
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Foreign and Apart
BOMB Magazine’s gotten a hold of Valeria Luiselli, and it’s really a treat to behold; asked about the fluidity of fiction in her essays, her response was more than candid: Well, that’s the whole point; there are no rules in…
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Talking Funny
There aren’t many things that make sense, nakedly, without justification or explanation or exposition. But George Saunders reading Barry Hannah and Grace Paley does. For the New Yorker‘s Page Turner, he leafs through Paley’s “Love,” Hannah’s “The Wretched Seventies,” and…
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Magical Thinking
When quizzed on his characters’ romantic proclivities, Haruki Murakami errs towards empathy: I occasionally think that, in our heart of hearts, we all may be seeking situations like this one—where our free will doesn’t apply and (almost) everything is determined…
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Coding the Pages
In Vikram Chandra’s eyes, programming’s a lot like penning a piece: When I first started programming, I was already writing my first novel, and the similarities became obvious right away: Both are iterative processes in which you construct bits of…
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Reworking History
Over at The Monthly, J.M. Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz elaborate on stringing a good yarn: What ties one to the real world is, finally, death. One can make up stories about oneself to one’s heart’s content, but one is not…