His films have neither the populist classicism of Francois Truffaut nor the chic experimentalism of Jean-Luc Godard; and unlike with Eric Rohmer, no one is curating Instagram accounts with outfits from his oeuvre. 

Evans’ FBI file is held in a federal facility hundreds of miles from Cleveland, and digitized scans of its components are not available online, making it difficult for the city’s residents to discover for themselves the scope of illegal surveillance their community faced.

At the Edge of the Woods is at once a feminist revenge fantasy, a fabulist tragedy, and a psychedelic paean to the wonders and blessings of the natural world. It might be best summarized, though, as the story of a barren individual—reproductively, but also metaphysically—regaining the ability to feel.

We are creatures of reference, engaged in private dialogue with the countless dead, blursed to imitate in small ways and in large our own personal Jesus.

The voice sometimes shifts drastically between essays, which is an intentional choice—me playing around with this idea of “code-switching,” and also this postmodern aesthetic of schizophrenia, where I don’t just write from a singular voice, but multiple.

Far from the “novel in tweets” that critics warned us about, we’ve instead arrived at the primacy of the disembodied voice as a character in of itself, jostling in the void to be the loudest of them all.

I asked my characters what they wanted and they answered. My goal was to write a book about middle America during the opioid epidemic. I ran cars full of dope boys with fake MRIs from Ohio to Florida.

If Jackson’s slim but astonishing oeuvre thus far boasts a leitmotif, it’s the (often male) doubles who embody some iteration of the dichotomy of the radical and the bourgeois—the guy who goes all in for life and love, and the guy who hedges his bets.

The three looked at the king like, wait, what the heck are you saying, and then they were given seven days to deliver the very heck in question: a real container for awe.

I’m interested in men who are struggling to communicate what they feel because they have no language for how they feel.

Then I realized “Damn, that’s fucked up” and ruminated, chewed on grass like a lilac cow in the Alps.

Wo’s is a drag poetics, intentionally unearthing all the unexamined bits of personhood, nature, and language itself in a sizzling burst of sequins.

“We can break the fourth wall. We’re writers—we do that.”

“I’m not that kind of writer,” I said.

Our ideas and definitions of awe are in many ways about an experience of something “greater” than humanness; something to be fearful of. I don’t know that I have experienced actual awe. I’m also not sure I believe that it is something to seek.

People will think what they think of Detroit. Some will take the time to explore, to hear the joyful voices and music and birdsong that twist through its streets. Some will never give it a chance.

chog an experience in eppy set: {x},{x} smeers to {yyyyyy}, concresscing, cryssle (CR) to cemend (CM). i positt a numbmur (n), it hings

These languages are kin; overlapping in vocabulary and structure, but diverging in pronunciation: Ukrainian, it is said, is more melodic.

To feel joined in a collective that knows how personal and heartbreaking a cultural betrayal can be, and to share the feeling of being met where one is, at odds with surrendering, disappointed it isn’t another way.

I keep meaning to write a poem about something really smart.

A certain kind of glamor resides not just in possessing a void like the great emptiness—which lends the person who holds it an air of depth, impenetrability, and mystery—but in one’s reaching for destructive, impulsive, or obsessive remedies to fill that void.