Dept. of Speculation is gorgeous, funny, a profound and profoundly moving work of art. Jenny Offill is a master of form and feeling, and she gets life on the page in new, startling ways.
I bought an energy bar, and as I ate it a great weariness came over me.
I’m a citizen of the republic of empathy.
You could touch for a couple of bucks. The window of the booth went up and you stuck out the bills. They might tell you not to pinch, but I was a stroke type anyway. Some guys, I guess they want to leave a mark. Me, I just like the feel.
This country was built on the backs of dudes who drank on buses. What we do honors them.
Kamby Bolongo Mean River is an original and fearless fiction. It bears genetic traces of Beckett and Stein, but Robert Lopez’s powerful cadences and bleak, joyful wit are all his own.
Of All the Gin Joints is one part cinematic history, one part old Hollywood weirdness, and one part handy basic bar guide, with a dash of romance and more than a few wry twists. Bailey and Hemingway prove themselves very entertaining cultural mixologists.
When you work at home, fellow alums, discipline is the supreme virtue. Suicidal self-loathing lurks behind every coffee break. Activities must be expertly scheduled, from shopping to showers to panic attacks.
There is nothing quite like the controlled burn of Eugene Marten’s prose. Waste is an exhilarating and unnerving piece of fiction.
Atticus Lish is a true original and this is a tremendous book, relentless, moving, written in prose of marvelous integrity. Now that America and the novel are dead, I hope we can have more great American novels as alive as this one.
No emotion or insight is too small to inflict on the world. Let it all fly. Don’t let it eat you from the inside.
Write what you know. Write what you don’t know. But most of all, write what you’d rather not know.
People gave names to things so they could tell stories about them, goddam fairy tales about children who got out alive.
Everything’s weird if you stare at it.
Stuff me in a tutu and let’s screen experimental videos all day.
I’d become one of those mistakes you sometimes find in an office, a not unpleasant but mostly unproductive presence bobbing along on the energy tides of others, a walking reminder of somebody’s error in judgement.
I knew I was in the vicinity of a serious lesson, if not about how to live life, then at least how to put some poetry into your craven retreat from it.
I felt as though I were snorting cocaine, or rappelling down a cliffside, or cliffsurfing off a cliff of pure cocaine.
Yes, we could solve for why, but we could also eat another slice of coconut cake.
Shudder, in fact, is not quite the word for the feeling. Feeling is not quite the word for the feeling. How’s bathing at knifepoint in the phlegm of the dead? Is that a feeling?