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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 …

I can translate a dominant, weak soul with my eyes closed. This monologue smacks of David Foster Wallace and J. D. Salinger to me. It feels so good to live in a century that has ceased to celebrate that voice. I can be sentimentally attached to it, of course, but its delightful shallowness is dryin…

I follow the Borges credo that literature is the friction coming from the veils and the levels and the frames, all the obstacles keeping a reader from obtaining the dream of truth. A translation is just one more literary veil added to the others. There’s no direct truth to be stared at. For this re…

IF YOU ARE CONSIDERING trying transcranial magnetic stimulation for yourself, I think you’ll find that its appeal lies in treating your depression not as a psychological disorder, or even a chemical imbalance, but as a basically electrical problem. Sure, you can talk to a therapist or a psychoanaly…