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Can a better kind of fiction save the world? There's always some tiny hope (strange things do happen), but the answer is almost certainly no, it can't. There is some reasonable chance, however, that it could save your soul. If you're unhappy about the hatred that's been unleashed in your heart, you…

[...] a high percentage of the most exciting fiction written in the last twenty-five years--the stuff I immediately mention if someone asks me what's terrific--has been short fiction. There's the Great One herself, naturally. There's also Lydia Davis, David Means, George Saunders, Amy Hempel, and t…

[...] For Dostoevsky--as for such latter-day literary heirs of his as Denis Johnson, David Foster Wallace, Irvine Welsh, and Michel Houellebecq--the impossibility of pressing the Pleasure bar forever, the inevitable breaking of some bleak and remorse-filled dawn, is the flaw in nihilism through whi…

[...] I was devoting a lot of energy to the morbid avoidance of colds, because whenever I got a cold I couldn't write or smoke, and whenever I couldn't write or smoke I couldn't feel smart, and feeling smart was pretty much my only defense against the word. [...]

[...] This was in 1979. I was exclusively reading great literature (Kafka, Goethe), and although I could forgive Ekström for not understanding what a serious person I'd become, I had zero interest in opening a book with such a lurid cover. [...]