I love short fiction as a form . . . I think it’s able to speak to the kinds of concerns I want to think about when reading—loneliness, grief, regret, the human condition—better than anything.
Geared to Machine as Metaphor and Driver: An Interview with Michael Salu, Part II
Much of the digital realm as it is currently constructed has been shifted to become a facilitator, or enactor, of a fascistic societal structure . . . We are increasingly encouraged to forgo critical thinking and to ignore how society is actually formed and slide along its autonomous rails.
Geared to Machine as Metaphor and Driver: An Interview with Michael Salu, Part I
There’s an intense metaphysical battle for the soul unfurling. One’s will and agency is funneled through coiling mechanical algorithms by technologists—so knowing exactly what cognitive levers to pull and how is of great consequence.
It’s still an open question in my mind whether writing can inspire or support good and loving actions at the scale that it facilitates and fuels evil ones.
I didn’t have a grand narrative. I didn’t have one idea of what it meant. I had many ideas of what might be happening to me, what sort of transformation this was . . . I wanted to leave room for that uncertainty and that process of making up my mind.
My grandmother’s house, which is the house in WOODWORM, is charged with strange energy. Nobody wants to sleep there alone, and it is common to have this feeling of being accompanied even if you don’t see or hear anyone.
Julia Kornberg & Jack Rockwell
The West might want us to think of ourselves as different and peripheral . . . they might urge us to portray images that fulfill their prejudices about Argentina, [but] we can have a more universalist approach and write, essentially, about whatever we want, and it will still be Argentine literature.
Life doesn’t make sense to us, disastrous and uncomfortable events happen suddenly, and without warning. It only makes sense, then, that stories should do the same.
[Giles] feels like she is the bridge: stuck, supporting everyone else in her life, carrying a weight she can’t quite pinpoint.
Maybe for the reader, the book itself is like a substitute for a crime, or a certain kind of violence which might otherwise have been turned on the world somehow.