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Well, I have no relationship to her. I’ve never met her. And as for her work, I came to it too late probably for it even to have been an influence, which fills me with despair. I am merely a big fan. She is a great artist, alive and among us, and still writing as well as she did at the start—if not…

[...] In general, if a person were to watch me work—which I am grateful no one ever has—I suspect it might look like a lot of cutting and pasting of notes, stopping, starting, staring, intermittent flurries (as the weatherpeople say), sudden visitations (by invisible forces), the contemplation of t…

As for the relationship of my fictional characters to me, their author, I suppose it would depend on which characters you mean. Each has a slightly different relationship, I believe—I hope. I assume you mostly mean the protagonists, who sometimes have the burden of having a couple of things in comm…

Des Esseintes' Last Book

       after Huysmans

It was red, which pleased him. Small
and hard, it fit in his palm
as if it loved him and was listening
to the strange, murmurous thumps
of his ambivalent heart. How sleekly
the pages brushed his skin, like sunligh…

[...] I had not wanted a dog, but the children loved him. It was true they did not fight so much now. The day my wife brought him home, my daughter held the dog in her arms and said, “This is the happiest day of my life.” Children are whores. They will say anything. But I thought it could be true.