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Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer features many great anecdotes, like Derluguian’s discovery that “the headquarters of the Islamic battalion are now located at Rosa Luxemburg Street, 12,” in Grozny. But no one — except grad students — reads a two-decade-old work of historical sociology for the details. Wha…

I do. The psychology of creative writing fascinates me—how different voices and points of view come into being. The reader’s involvement is crucial as well. Sometimes I think of the way a writer opens a novel as akin to how clinical psychology begins, with a kind of contract that the reader—God, I …

I’m a firm believer in tricking myself as I write. Bad confessional poetry has always raised my hackles, because it goes skewering in deep, exclaiming, Ooh, look at all this blood! But I’m like, No one’s interested in your blood. Make me bleed as I’m reading.

Down the hall a door creaked. She wrenched away. Horror wiped his face blank.

“Take the beer,” he said.

Adult collusion. His hand destroyed the evidence. A few pieces fell on the floor.

Upstairs, she could hear them talking. No words, just a man’s voice, a woman’s, back and forth.

The not-quite-not-yet-maybe-soon Natalia took another sip of beer then brushed his trousered leg with one bare foot. Her present-tense self trembled. He didn’t seem to notice. Talking to her was a pretext to speak whatever he usually left unspoken even to himself.

“You wouldn’t be able to tell n…