Beauty salons are, in their own way, war trenches and dugouts. Hungry soldiers hide in them, smeared with creams, injured by injections, ready to endure anything for the sake of anything.
The only language the cosmetologist understood — the woman knew this with a sure and certain knowledge — was the language of skin.
You can visit the cosmetologist whenever you feel troubled, but you must arm yourself with phrases like My face is bloated or My skin is dehydrated, it lost its lust…
I EDIT THREE TYPES of work: my writing, other people’s writing, and the two-headed monster that is my translation work — a mix of my writing and somebody else’s. When I teach creative writing I also close read the so-called classics with my students. These four activities amount to a lot of extreme…
GRANULAR WORK on literature has shown me that there’s no way to stay whole if you are to participate in the publicity spin cycle that enfolds books the way it does everything. Working on translations helps in this respect. You get very close to the imagery and the sentences. You live in a kind of s…
I had an early fall deadline, which meant that from May to August I had to rush through the long novel. Its unrelenting cruelty entered my imagination at a disorienting pace, the nonsense of every vignette in the book a whirlwind of pain and revelation I couldn’t just stop and process. Every day I …
