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People who feel safe and able or who have privilege should use the space they create for themselves to make more space for people from marginalized communities. We all need to hold space for one another.
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How do you represent, in a different tongue, the languages within the language of the original text?
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I think we are all shaped by history, whether we accept this or not.
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I have long gravitated toward books that know where they are situated.
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Gravity is what tethers us to the earth and to those we love, but it is also what we are constantly trying to escape. Anchor is about both these states—the holding on and the letting go—and the tension between them.
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. . . good writing and good storytelling has to exceed the relatable . . .
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We lose track of things and people over time. But back then, they felt like everything.
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Teenagers are brilliant—you actually get duller as an adult . . .
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I think humor is so important to who we are as people, how we deal with pain, how we connect with one another. It’s essential to my being and my writing.
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Two huge things happened to me when I was quite young: I went mad, and I fell in love, in relatively swift succession.
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From Ball’s absurdist perspective, leaning into the world’s inherent purposelessness isn’t about embracing mortality. It’s about embracing complete obliteration.
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Writing started feeling interesting again, like it was worth it after all, and not just a boring thing that ate ham sandwiches on white bread for every meal and whose favorite book from last year was [Redacted] by [Famous author], which remained on the NYT Bestsellers List for what felt like forever.
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I have great affection for writers who come into their queerness after they’ve already written books . . .
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Almost ten years have passed since Lynn Xu’s debut, the luminous Debts & Lessons, introduced us to her oracle. “Let it not be for what you write, the world / I mean,” opens one of the collection’s signature center-justified poems, redeemed from any elitist snark about the form’s limitations. That collection’s first poem, “Say You […]
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Within true community, we can experience our deepest vulnerabilities because we know that we are safe to fail, encouraged to thrive, and needed to be part of something greater than our little selves.
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Which Side Are You On is a novel both of the heart and the mind: one that makes you think and question your perception of the world and your place in it, and feel deeply and fervently about what matters to you.
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I think that it’s helpful to imagine your own people as your primary audience even when you are also writing for an audience that doesn’t necessarily belong to this community.
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Safety requires setting up clear boundaries, but a restricted life is lonely and isolating and often impossible to bear.
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I imagined myself as a lone satellite floating in outer space trying to reach earth.
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. . . language is duplicitous. To be broken is perhaps to be part of a process (or a metaphor for life), where to bend (and survive) also leads to being broken. In this context, the word “broken” in “Reverse Engineer” might well point to a hard-won success.
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Only after this memoir was I able to see the Kafka truth: We are telling our necessary truths. We are the necessary heroes of our own narratives. Somewhere inside all of it, there is a collective truth, one we can safely tell.
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. . . a scathing, satirical campus novel about academia, orientalism, the Western commodification of Asian cultures, and the lengths to which institutions will go to protect their reputations and their darlings.
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Love is just extremely terrifying and kind of abysmal.
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I don’t ever do anything from a place of fear—which is an odd place for me to be in because I have anxiety—but I have to [step into places of discomfort] because that’s where growth happens. If you’re comfortable, you’re not growing.
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Rather than saying, Fuck it, and remaining stagnant in the face of cultural horrors, Monson suggests readers start with the marginalia. Exhaust all possibilities. Carve a new path where sweeping prescriptions fail to stick.
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I was looking for people who had something to say beyond This is the dumbest movie of all time.
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A roundup of great books that didn’t make it into Sketch Book Reviews this year
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to be seen is not the same thing as being known
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In which one Samantha interviews another.
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