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I was an engineering student in college, at the Colorado School of Mines, and came to fiction late, with a particular understanding of fiction’s purpose. I’d had a powerful experience one summer, reading The Grapes of Wrath at night, in an old RV in my parents’ driveway in Amarillo, after long days…

For the last twenty years, at Syracuse University, I’ve been teaching a class in the nineteenth-century Russian short story in translation. My students are some of the best young writers in America. (We pick six new students a year from an applicant pool of between six and seven hundred.) They arri…

Invocations of “since the 1970s” pepper Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, making the decade one of the few punctuating moments in Piketty’s otherwise glacially paced account of the patterns of wealth distribution. Since the 1970s, as Piketty’s data starkly demonstrate, private w…

“Look,” he says later, when I admit that the Extreme Animals stuff hadn’t really done it for me, and that noise music in general has always utterly mystified me. “You have to understand . . . I feel embarrassed that this is what I’ve spent my life doing. In a way, it’s really bleak. Like when you’r…

The room is dark and smells like a sleeping person; there are records and DVDs everywhere, and a suitcase flung open on the floor that’s piled high with clothes. I ask Juice whether it’s all he brought to New York and he says yes. He is wearing a hoodie and a jacket with the NBC logo on the back, a…