by Alex Shephard

Pathos: Alex Gilvarry

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The business of writing is contingent on the tastes and judgment of others. Editors, critics, Oprah. Again, we adapt to tune it all out.

Christopher R. Beha

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Most of the time I don’t believe in God, but I always believe in the soul. When I say that I want to write about the experience of being human, I want to write about what it’s like to have a soul.

Miles Klee

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Drugs are always going to be hot.

Jennifer Miller

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When you’re talking about extremophile life, it’s all relative: normal to them is not normal to us.

Ben Marcus

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I think it’s a love letter to language. Or maybe a “Dear John” letter.

Stewart O’Nan

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It can’t last, that love or romance or the feeling that we have about almost anything. It can’t last; it changes. That’s not a bad thing or a good thing. It just is. That’s what we’re up against.

Alex Gilvarry

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I wanted to write a novel about Guantanamo, to where no one else had to write another novel about it again. I think that’s the way everybody should write.

Full Stop Around The Web: Funerals, Partridges, and Waffles

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Max Rivlin-Nadler on funeral conventions! Michael Schapira on Alan Partridge! Eric Jett and yours truly on The Situation in American Waffles!

Téa Obreht

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“There are moments in stories by Bulgakov and by Garcia Marquez, both of whom I love, where things are never presented as potential facts: they’re just facts. I think that The Tiger’s Wife ended up dealing with whether or not something is potential fact.”

Chris Adrian

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I write about people who are wondering about what it means to be a good person. That’s probably the main question that characters in this novel seem to struggle with: how are they going to manage to be happy, given that people die?