Interviews

Bennett Sims

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My thoughts tend to run toward worst-case scenarios and I’m quick to misread social cues or assume the worst, and because it’s the way I process data, I have to assume it’s going to keep showing up in my writing.

Christopher Hacker

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We need to speak the name of terrible things occasionally, to touch these things with our imaginations, in order to be reminded that the euphemisms we use are not the thing itself.

Karen Russell

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If given my druthers, everything I write would be some B horror movie “Swiss Family Robinson” situation. That just seems to be where I live, narratively.

Rachel Kushner

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Art is about play and about transcendent meanings, not reducible to politics.

Ramona Ausubel

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There’s something about language that to me is so special, and I feel like it goes right past all my logical brain workings. It feels like a drug.

Pathos: Sam Lipsyte

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The fiction writer, at least, creates the lie to contain the truth.

Lisa Cohen

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Every biography is a failure in some way. It’s laced with all kinds of opacities, instabilities.

Kristopher Jansma

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I don’t know the underlying reason why I’m a bad liar, but I know the reason I get caught is because I can’t look somebody in the eye and lie to them at the same time.

Paula Bomer

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Birth is a hallucinatory experience.

Sam Lipsyte

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I don’t think that self-loathing really gives you the pleasure that masturbation does.