Elissa Schappell is the author of two books of fiction, Blueprints for Building Better Girls and Use Me, which was a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway award. She is a co-founder and now Editor-at-Large of Tin House and a contributing editor to Vanity Fair. She teaches in the Columbia MFA program and the low-res MFA at Queens in Charlotte, NC. She lives in Brooklyn.
From Ball’s absurdist perspective, leaning into the world’s inherent purposelessness isn’t about embracing mortality. It’s about embracing complete obliteration.