At the time, I was intrigued by these writers and their profoundly internal, often speechless fiction (especially as a high schooler who was annoyed by the twang of speech in most of the largely white American fiction that was assigned to us; a twang that was always implicitly and sentimentally sold to students as the American voice); the knife-edge of clarity and madness that many of these books balanced upon; most of all the singularity of their brutally lonely, often suicidal characters.
