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In March of last year, English-language readers were finally presented with Satantango, the first novel by Laszlo Krasznahorkai, the writer Susan Sontag once called “the contemporary Hungarian master of the apocalypse.” The novel, considered a masterpiece in the author’s native country since its original publication in 1985, adds to his work now available in English, [...]

Freaks… are like a person in a fairy tail who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle.

“Reading fiction is much cheaper than therapy or Prozac, and definitely more enjoyable. If only all the books could fit inside the medicine cabinet.”

The title character of my novel, What Happened to Sophie Wilder, is a young writer who converts to Catholicism. This may seem to some readers like an odd thing for a young writer to do. It certainly seems that way to the book’s narrator…

“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 [...]