“Wilderness is now, inescapably …. this human creation. Which is a paradox, because it’s supposed to be the area beyond human creation. When we think we’re experiencing the wild, we’re often imagining the wild. What would be genuinely wild? I think you’d almost need a new language.”
“Somehow in those weeks of careening around Europe in a state of quasi-terror, not even trusting my own thoughts, I realized that writing was the thing that held the world together for me, and gave it meaning.”
“Frankly, the business side of this whole thing, which is what the publishers care about and what the journalists write about, is boring. There’s really not much nuance there. It’s all about finding the right business model to navigate through this transition, one that will maximize profits and minimize carnage. But for the writers, this is all so much more interesting. Are they scared or excited? How do these shifts change how they think about their art?”
“I can’t say what the effect is, if any, on people in the mass. In a way, that is not my problem: I just generate the work, and then other people decide how to use it, in whatever way seems most useful to them.”
“How can I possibly ask somebody to read all of this shit that I just made up? It’s asking a huge amount of someone – it’s like asking someone to listen to your dream! It’s a huge imposition.”
“I don’t think that the decisions we make when we are not under any pressure, when our lives are going well, really say very much about us.”
“I think everyone should sort of have that branded on their arm: that you don’t know what’s happening, you don’t know what’s happening.”
Edan Lepucki in conversation with Alex Shephard If Edan Lepucki wrote an essay about the phone book, I would probably read it. Her work for The Millions is warm, engaging, and incredibly sharp, and her essays have helped make that site one of the best places to find quality long-form literary criticism on the web.
“Other People We Married, Straub’s debut story collection, is one of the funniest and saddest books I’ve read in some time. It’s also one of the best.”
Jessica Francis Kane in conversation with Alex Shephard What is there to say about a massacre? This is the question that Kurt Vonnegut poses at the beginning of Slaughterhouse Five. It’s also a question that we, as a nation, have been asking ourselves since the tragic shooting in Tucson which left six dead, including a […]