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“It’s not as celebrated, the home front, with its Victory Gardens and rationing, its domestic ennui and abstract terrors, but there were women whose words cut as close to the bone as any by Ernest Hemingway or Siegfried Sassoon.”

“Oregon. There’s no place like it anywhere on earth. Its poets rise up straight from the black soil of rain forests, its rivers, its concrete and asphalt. They are building bridges. We are walking across to meet them.”

Few national literatures, however, have been as marked by a single author as Egypt’s literature has been marked by Naguib Mahfouz. A titan of international letters — and the only Egyptian author to be honored with the Nobel Prize — Mahfouz dominates most any discussion of Egyptian fiction in the 20th century.

“Fifty years from now, how will people have deeper access to the wonderful phenomena of mid-century American jazz, something behind the scenes, something more human than the hardcore iconography that develops when history is based on pinnacle moments?”

“Charles Darwin standing in the midst of a pastel mushroom forest with a faceless hermaphrodite was just what I needed.”

“These were stories told against the backdrop of something larger and more frightening. They were also bloody.”

“We are more than dying flies in a shithouse…”

“I measure a book’s impact by how it irrevocably changes an image or word or impression for me.”

“A truly erotic story must, finally, be tragic.”

“They are the bacon of internet digestion”

The reason I was heading to Cleveland, the place I’d grown up but hadn’t seen since I left for college, was to promote my novel, Erased. After all, the book’s about a guy who goes to Cleveland because he gets a postcard from his dead mother, a transcriber, and I myself had been transcribed, in [...]