The horrors on the unknown side of the half-known life have a way of lurking in the corners, not satisfied remaining hidden.

Imagine Duchamp’s The Large Glass if the bachelors and bride had transcended their respective glass panels, and were living happily ever after in Philly. I don’t know if I’d travel to Philly to see that.

When I finish a project that I was completely invested in, I’m pretty emptied out. It’s kind of like post-coital melancholy.

People disappear every day, every year. Some people who disappear are killed. Some people who disappear are never found. This is not simply a matter of being smaller than a pixel.

Imagine Duchamp’s The Large Glass if the bachelors and bride had transcended their respective glass panels, and were living happily ever after in Philly. I don’t know if I’d travel to Philly to see that.

While I hope that in the sequel the characters devote their lives to some kind of fight for social justice, this story itself, told by a woman, about women, is refreshing.

Beautiful Soul, in its scrupulous attention to phrase and image in almost every sentence, could be called an attempt to bring the characters and their milieu to life through the vigor of the words on the page.

Following the tracks Carson leaves in the language is a little like getting to be a dog for an hour, for a day.

When I finish a project that I was completely invested in, I’m pretty emptied out. It’s kind of like post-coital melancholy.

I derive particular satisfaction from delving, in language, into my native Polish core. Having been an exile of many years, this has a particular relevance and poignancy.

I actually think this is a highly existential book. For example, I think the ending of the Kardashians section is completely a meditation on death.

In our contemporary, very American idea of nonfiction, there cannot be much permission for a heightened or slippery narrator. And I’m so interested in slipperiness!

While shoveling scoops of Zen Cheddar into brown paper bags, my boss decried Orville Redenbacher and the other scions of big popcorn. It was easy to empathize with the precarious position of my employer.

Top Gun didn’t win the 1987 People’s Choice Award for its accurate representation of the fragility of human existence. The opposite, actually.

Since the latest crisis in Iraq began, the twin evils of ceaseless sectarian retrenchment and unaccountable governance have been cast in stark relief. Three new books help us make sense of the past eleven years of Iraqi history.

I’m El Salvadoran to an Oaxacan, mulatto to a Haitian squinting her eyes, black to the negro curious about America’s slave past, and white to any Anglo too busy finding what they want to see there. Either I am nobody, or I am a nation.

The horrors on the unknown side of the half-known life have a way of lurking in the corners, not satisfied remaining hidden.

People disappear every day, every year. Some people who disappear are killed. Some people who disappear are never found. This is not simply a matter of being smaller than a pixel.

The culprit is always the invader, even if the invader is a child.

The facts of Hobby Lobby may not be funny, but the name is a continuation of an American tradition of levity.