Posts by author
Bryan Washington
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Way Back When
In the middle of a digression on the bar scene in Kansas, Edmund White took a moment to question its authenticity: Sometimes gay friends my age or older ask me if I ever miss the good-bad old days before gay…
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Fire in a Blackout
In Egypt, as elsewhere, journalists are under fire.: Those who do not adhere to self-censorship are likely to face pressure from the state. Al-Masdar website features political news and is loosely affiliated to the recently banned secular activist group April 6 Movement.…
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Re-Referencing the Self
When Tao Lin asked Ben Lerner about his new novel’s epigraph, Lerner touched on the merits of the parable: I think the parable is a peculiar way of saying that redemption is immanent whether or not it’s imminent, that the world…
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Chipping at Wonder Woman
Samuel “Chip” Delany’s penned the landmark 800 page science fiction tri-sexual space novel, any number of short stories set through all corners of the galaxy, and a craft book Junot Diaz calls “a measure of what all criticism and literature…
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Properly Bruised
Talking to Margaret Eby, Saeed Jones waxes poetic on his lexicon: “I was obsessed with the word ‘boy’, in all its facets,” Jones says. “There are the racial connotations, but also the American-ness of the word, the way it’s used…
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Dissecting Possibilities
When asked about the seeds of his new memoir, Francisco Goldman was more than candid: This book emerged because I wasn’t ready to go back to fiction. I had a form of survivor’s guilt, I suppose. For me, writing imaginary…
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Seriously Serious
Over at the Paris Review, Jason Novak has taken up the pen again; this time, he’s turned to authors and their eccentricities. Among his observations: “Somewhere Hemingway is sitting quietly at his desk. Pouring another bull. And fighting another drink.”…
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Broke and Broken
Saeed Jones published a book of poems, Prelude To Bruise. Over at Buzzfeed, he’ll tell you why he wrote them, too: “My mother had a fatal heart attack the night before Mother’s Day in 2011. The experience of losing her…
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Properly Blootered
The New Republic has taken the task of dissecting our collective drunkenness; or at least the words we’ve used to describe it: There seems to be a universal trend to avoid stating the obvious. To describe someone as simply drunk, in…
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Another Station
When the The New York Times asked for his background, Ben Lerner answered the best he could: “Suburban-white-kid crime, Columbine High School sort of thing,” he said. “A violence of numbness and identitylessness.” In the Parul Sehgal’s piece, the author…
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On Oryx and Crake
Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake has been adapted for HBO, and the good folks at Vulture have asked her about it. She riffs on language, Comic-Con, and The Hunger Games’ “stimulated environment”: I think the real issues there are moral:…