I left the bank fully and completely realized as ELVIA INC, annual projected revenue: one million dollars.
Writers, like lone gunmen, are compulsive worldbuilders. They write their own past, present, and future. DeLillo has described himself as a man in a small room.
Among the power brokers of the art world, the recent weakness in the market hardly registers as a crisis. But the effects of this deeper, structural change will be felt outside of art's capitals.
If the Stalinist party line was Proletarian Realism, we could perhaps call The Girl a Proletarian Impressionism: not approaching anything like full abstraction, and yet focused considerably more on the sense of a given reality than perfect fidelity to the likeness you'd like it to have.
Why is pain so hard to describe? Of course, there’s the obvious issue: it monopolizes any brain space that might have been used to cultivate apt metaphors and precise descriptions. But even Greenwell’s well-wrought sentences—more vivid than most—leave the sensation out of reach.
sunrise broken open
against rowhome
roof matchbox town
For real you can trust me in a country that can only
be explained by computers who’ll hallucinate
I wonder why I am up at such a bleak hour of the morning to watch two men hurt each other.
I took them, these placebo pills, because they allowed me to assert control over my impulses. I had once been a woman domineered by primitive and animalistic impulses, with too many opinions and too much attitude.
I’d meant to write about the blood
spurting from his neck. But then
there will be more of those the less.
In the moonlight, I thought I could read the lines around your smile, but I would not know the right thing—not then—and so there we were, with no one telling us how to begin, nor how to comply.
By being private it may be wildly public. How do you find yourself navigating these questions of audience, who a book is for, what its public role is, once it’s off the desk and out in the world?