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The arc of every human life is measured out by the ceaseless accumulation of knowledge. Requiring only awareness and yet always welcoming curiosity

The arc of every human life is measured out by the ceaseless accumulation of knowledge. Requiring only awareness and yet always welcoming curiosity, the transmission of knowledge into the sentient mind is an uninterruptible process of ebbings and flowings. There are times—in infancy, or when at school in youth—during which the rate at which knowledge is gathered becomes intense and urgent, a welling tsunami of information ever ready for the mind to process. At other times, maybe later in life, the inbound knowledge drifts in more slowly, set to adhere and thicken like moss, or a patina.

Digital amnesia, for example, is now widely agreed to be a phenomenon, a thing. It is a condition that posits that words looked up online are often forgotten almost as quickly as they are acquired. Information that we know can easily be Googled needs never be known, or if it is known, needs never to be retained. Telephone numbers, for example, once so often known and the more cherished ones remembered, need not even be known at all now. The name of the person to be called is all that is required. The name is hyperlinked to the phone’s dialing system and merely touching the name gets the distant phone to ring.

A Chinese school final exam is to the American SAT as Go is to Go Fish.

…knowledge has long been seen as far too precious to treat with casual disregard. It needs to not just be kept, but kept safe and secure. For almost as long as language, especially written language, has existed, we have sought ways of collecting, storing, and safeguarding this endlessly swelling body of what is known, of what has been learned, and of all that can then be taught, discussed, challenged, debated, and decided. The most widely recognized and most ancient means of storage is the institution that derives its English name from the Latin word for the inner bark of a tree, on which early works were said to have been written. The Latin word for this bark is liber; by way of centuries of etymological convolution, the English word, used since Chaucer’s time, is, of course, the library.

Why…did the transmission of knowledges that seem so potentially beneficial to us all get to be so drowned out by the noise of commerce and nationalism and war?

What can and may and will happen next to our mental development if and when we have no further need to know, perhaps no need to think? What if we are then unable to gain true knowledge, enlightenment, or insight—that most precious of human commodities, true wisdom? What then will become of us?

How, in sum, do we value the knowledge that, thanks to the magic of electronics, is now cast before us in so vast and ceaseless and unstoppable a cascade? Amid the torrent and its fury, what is to become of thought—care and calm and quiet thoughtfulness? What of our own chance of ever gaining wisdom? Do we need it? Does anybody? How does a world function if no one within it is wise?

The dead, after all, do not walk backwards but they do walk behind us. They have no lungs and cannot call out but would love for us to turn around. T

The dead, after all, do not walk backwards but they do walk behind us. They have no lungs and cannot call out but would love for us to turn around. They are victims of love, many of them. – Anne Carson - from the epigraph

We are our own ghosts, dragging our mournful pasts behind us forever.

The front door closes, and absence returns to apartment 2B. but there is still someone here to record the fact, this unseen eye that moves across the floor as it if were a page, sweeps the bedroom, the naked walls, lingers at the single living room window with its blinds at half-mast.

I’ve been interested for a long time in how the trauma of war and displacement plays out across generations. So this was one of the main ideas I wanted to explore in the novel. Many of the conflicts in this novel have ties to the United States, which of course can sadly be said of many conflicts in the world today. We are all implicated. But simply on a craft level, as a writer, there were some conflicts that I wanted to include for personal reasons.
The conflict in Lebanon is one of them, as my great-grandparents fled to Cuba following early conflict there at the turn of the last century. The violence in Cuba and its long aftermath is of course a special obsession as the daughter of Cuban immigrants. And the conflict in Afghanistan looms large for us as Americans and for me personally as I spent ten unforgettable days in the country in 1998. - from the Lithub interview

SHAPIRO: You introduce us very early on in the text to a Spanish word, morrina. What does the word mean? And how did you think about the concept in relation to the narrative you were writing?
MENENDEZ: It's a concept that I think runs through maybe all of my books - this sense of saudade, as the Portuguese maybe would describe it. Most cultures have a word for this. It's this sort of bittersweet nostalgia - the sense that the past is sweet and wonderful to wallow in precisely because it cannot be recovered. And I think that that's an obsession that has run through most of what I write - not consciously but simply as a product of my upbringing and my own situation. My parents, of course, are immigrants. They call themselves exiles from Cuba. And so for me, it speaks to, you know, one doesn't need to be an exile or a migrant to have this sense that things were sweet in the past and to sort of take refuge in it. – from the NPR interview

In the English novels she studied in school, the characters all seemed masters of their own fates. When they stumbled, it was because of a flaw. The direction their lives took was the direction they determined through their choices. But this was not Margot’s experience of the world. The world so far acted on her without consultation or sympathy. Her life, dictated first by her family’s wealth and now by her husband’s work, lacked the agency she was taught to recognize in great works. Even this latest leaving had been out of her hands. Maybe the only true literature was the old ghost stories her grandmother used to whisper to her on those windy cold nights on the Pampas. Spirit and mortals alike, all subject to unseen forces that swelled beneath them, hidden and untamable.

Ana Menéndez has published five books of fiction: The Apartment (2023), Adios, Happy Homeland! (2011), The Last War (2009), Loving Che (2004) and In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd (2001), whose title story won a Pushcart Prize. She has worked as a journalist in the United States and abroad, lastly as a prize-winning columnist for The Miami Herald.
As a reporter, she wrote about Cuba, Haiti, Kashmir, Afghanistan, and India. Her work has appeared in Vogue, Bomb Magazine, The New York Times and Tin House and has been included in several anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature. She has a BA in English from Florida International University and an MFA from New York University.
From 2008 to 2009, she lived in Cairo as a Fulbright Scholar in Egypt. She has also lived in India, Turkey, Slovakia and The Netherlands, where she designed a creative writing minor at Maastricht University in 2011. For the past 20 years, she has taught at various writing conferences and programs including, most recently, Bread Loaf and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She lives in Miami and is currently an associate professor at FIU with joint appointments in English and the Wolfsonian Public Humanities Lab.

…it’s hard to remember sometimes that no one is only who they appear to be at the moment. It’s hard to remember sometimes all that goes into a life

…it’s hard to remember sometimes that no one is only who they appear to be at the moment. It’s hard to remember sometimes all that goes into a life, all the different versions of a person, throughout the years, all the ways in which people are capable of changing.

…sometimes he is utterly exhausted by being an adult, by being someone, expected to explain the world to younger people, as if he’s in possession of the right answers.

I was very interested in showing people who are all different from one another, so I sat down and brainstormed a bunch of different people, who might be working at the mall or go to the mall. I wanted these people to be those whose lives would not otherwise intersect with one another. I also thought about conflict and tension; I have these characters who are extremely set in their ways and believe one thing so strongly. When you put them in scenes with each other, you can see what might happen. It’s also about questioning: are they going to stay static, or is there room for growth? If there is room, how much would feel realistic? With the multiple narrators, I enjoyed being able to get into each of their perspectives. A character might seem a certain way and be really frustrating in one chapter, when viewed through someone else’s thought process. In a later chapter, you might get their own thought process—they might still be frustrating, but you could at least understand why they believe the things that they believe. - from the Electric Lit interview

I wanted there to be ten chapters in the span of ten months, leading up to the mall’s closing. While writing these stories, I was thinking a lot about Olive Kitteridge and Olive Again, by Elizabeth Strout, and how those circled around a particular place, which was a small town in Maine.

“People who often get the most attention are the loudest, but people who are the quietest often have a lot going on inside. I wanted to explore that in this book. Many of the characters I write about are isolated and lonely. Many are not living the lives they had once wished for. As a writer I can explore the interiors of these people. I can go into their minds and show what they’re thinking and how they’re feeling.” - from the Times-Union interview

I had my first sabbatical during the 2018-19 school year, and that’s when I wrote the first draft of my novel. I tricked myself by saying, ‘It’s not a novel. It’s a series of linked stories.’ - from the Times Union interview

I can’t take credit for it; my agent came up with it. My original title was Those Days at the Mall, which is a character’s line in the very last chapter. Obviously, the mall map says “You Are Here.” But it’s also so much about place and where people spend their time. So, the question behind the title was thinking about where we spend our days. -from the Electric Lit interview

She stares at her son, willing him to look at her and tell her about the magic tricks he’s been practicing. She wants him to invite her to his school talent show. She wants him to tell her about the videos he’s been watching. But he just keeps reading. Tina looks down at the desk, sees her sketch of the goose, peeking out from under some menus. Jackson shuffled around, and she grabs the sketch, balls it up, and drops it into the garbage can finish the desk. As the crumpled paper falls from her hand, she thinks it’s not just that Jackson is hiding something from her; it’s that he is imitating her. He’s keeping secret something that’s important to him, maybe because he’s afraid he’s no good or it’s silly or she’d be disappointed to know he cares about such a thing. She feels certain he has learned to be quiet and secretive, and to not allow himself to talk about impractical dreams from her.

Karin Lin-Greenberg is an American fiction writer. Her story collection, Faulty Predictions (University of Georgia Press, 2014), won the 2013 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction[1] and the 2014 Foreword Review INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award (Gold Winner for Short Stories).[2] Her stories have appeared in The Antioch Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, Epoch, Kenyon Review Online, New Ohio Review, The North American Review, and Redivider. She is currently an associate professor of English at Siena College in Loudonville, New York. She has previously taught at Missouri State University, The College of Wooster, and Appalachian State University. She earned an MFA in Fiction Writing from the University of Pittsburghin 2006, an MA in Literature and Writing from Temple University in 2003, and a BA in English from Bryn Mawr College.

Tribalism is governed by a force so motivationally powerful that it predicts more of your behavior than your race, class, nationality, or religion

Tribalism is governed by a force so motivationally powerful that it predicts more of your behavior than your race, class, nationality, or religion. The formal analysis of this incredible phenomenon has only just begun, but the emerging science reveals that these factors are mere subjugates to our primal instinct to be a member of a tribe. This “Tribe Drive” is an ancient adaptation that has been a prerequisite for survival for 99.9 percent of our species’ evolutionary history. It is a critical piece of cognitive machinery—honed by millions of years of evolution—that gave us the ability to navigate, both cooperatively and competitively, increasingly complex social landscapes. But now that our species spans billions across the globe, does this adaptation continue to serve us, or is it mismatched to its environment? In other words, what happens when humans become either tribeless or destructively consumed by tribalism?

So next time you hear a raving demagogue counseling hatred for other, slightly different groups of humans, for a moment at least see if you can understand his problem: He is heeding an ancient call that—however dangerous, obsolete, and maladaptive it may be today—once benefited our species. — CARL SAGAN AND ANN DRUYAN, 1993

The core of the mismatch is that modern society has made us more physically isolated by decreasing our social support; all the while it has made us more mentally unstable by increasing social pressure, tricking us into thinking that low grade online and institutional social interaction is good enough to live a healthy and fulfilling life. In this sense, the people who dwelled in the first tribes were not challenged as much as we are today. Their units were glued together in a common struggle for survival, not the weak ideological grounds many use as the foundation to their tribal social identities today.

The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship. . . . Putting it another way, it’s the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar. — ROBIN DUNBAR, 1996

When we grow, develop, and live in a world where everything is geared toward the individual, how can we help but view the world with a more narcissistic lens? When we live with other people, share resources within the environment, and work through problems together, the outcome is an individual that is less self-centered and more psychologically flexible.

The sea whispers, faint. It sounds like pages shuffling. A seal barks. I lick a finger and test the breeze. The wind is in the east. A moment late

The sea whispers, faint. It sounds like pages shuffling. A seal barks. I lick a finger and test the breeze. The wind is in the east. A moment later it comes, mournful and high. The stones are singing and I feel it, at last, that I’m home. I listen for a time, despite my tiredness. I think, if heartbreak had a sound, it would be just like this.

She can smell him the way wild animals smell prey.

The visions don’t frighten me anymore. I can usually tell what’s real and what isn’t.

The leaves of the sugar maple whisper—under it, there’s a high-pitched whine, a long shrill note like bad singing…it sounds like all the things you’re not supposed to believe in—mermaids, selkies, sirens…’What’s that sound?’ It seems like it’s coming from inside of me, somehow. Dad pauses in the act of unlocking the door. ‘It’s the stones on the beach. High tide has eaten away at them, making little holes—kind of like finger stops on a flute—and when the wind is in the east, coming over the ocean, it whistles through.’

Sometimes her mother talks to Pearl in the night. She learns to keep herself awake, so she can hear her. It always happens the same way. Rebecca’s coming. It starts with the sound of the wind roaring in Pearl’s head, just like that day on the mountain. And then Rebecca’s warm hands close over her cold ears.

I suffer from hypnagogic hallucinations. They started when I was about 13, taking the form of a hand in the small of my back as I was falling asleep, shoving me out of bed really hard. I knew there was someone in the room and I knew they didn’t mean me well. With the information I had at the time – pre-Google as well – there was no other explanation for it, was there? I think it’s probably the deepest chasm I have ever looked into. There’s nothing comparable to it in the daylight world. - from the 9/26/22 Guardian interview

Writers are monsters, really. We eat everything we see.

The book is a mirror and I am stepping through the looking glass.

‘Writing is power,’ she says. ‘Big magic. It’s a way of keeping someone alive forever.’

I think about our three names, us kids, as we were. ‘Wilder,’ I whisper to myself sometimes. ‘Nathaniel, Harper.’ We’re all named after writers. It’s too much of a coincidence. Harper. Wilder. Harlow. The names chime together. The kind of thing that would never happen in real life but it might happen in a book.

‘You wanted to live forever,’ Harper says gently. ‘You both did, you and Wilder. That’s all writers really want, whatever they say.

I wake to the sound of breath. No hand caressing me, this time. Instead I have the sense that I am being pummeled and stretched, pulled by firm hands into agonizing, geometrical shapes. I scream but no voice comes from my throat. Instead, an infernal scratching—horrible, like rats’ claws on stone, like bone grinding, like the creak of a bough before it breaks. Or like a pen scratching on paper.

Pinky arrived punctually and silently in a highly modified Tesla equipped with bulletproof glass, a sound system that could liquefy granite and a f

Pinky arrived punctually and silently in a highly modified Tesla equipped with bulletproof glass, a sound system that could liquefy granite and a front seat customized to accommodate Pinky’s body, which weighed a tad over 430 pounds and measured nearly the same horizontally as vertically. Pinky, whose real name was Bob Kearful, had once been a standout nose tackle at the University of Florida and probably would have gone to the NFL had it not been for a crucial play in the Florida-Georgia game during which he bit off the little finger of a Georgia offensive guard and refused to spit it out. This conduct was deemed so unsportsmanlike that Pinky was permanently banned from the game, though it also earned him his nickname and the undying affection of Gator fans.

Originally this book was going to be much snakier. Then I had breakfast with Carl [Hiaasen], and he had just finished writing “Squeeze Me.”
I said, what’s it about? And he said, it’s in Palm Beach and there are pythons. I said, are there a lot of pythons in it? And he said yes.
So in “Swamp Story” the missing Confederate gold treasure buried in the Everglades sort of replaced the pythons in the plot. - from the Tampa Bay Times interview

He wore a filthy pair of cut-off University of Florida sweatpants, nothing else. Yet he still looked better than 99.999 percent of all human males who had ever walked the Earth. He was strikingly handsome in a classic Tom Cruise—in–his–prime way—thick, jet-black hair; brilliant green eyes; high cheekbones; square jaw. He was tall, a foot taller than Cruise, and his body, despite the fact that he never seemed to do anything for it, was spectacular—lean, muscular and sculpted, the body of an elite athlete in peak condition.

Who inspired Slater?

There are a lot of Slater-like guys in Miami. There are large sections, a whole community of people who are all about looks, about appearance. Looks are very important in this town.
So he’s just the distilled essence of a million guys walking around admiring their own beauty
That’s the essence of Slater — to the people who are into reality TV, nothing is as important to them as this fake thing, reality TV, and now TikTok as well. They never experience anything for itself, it’s always, how can I use this to get myself on the internet, on people’s phones?
- from the Tampa Bay Times interview

Most of your books have been nonfiction, and your most recent novel for adults, “Insane City,” was published 10 years ago. What moved you to write another novel?
I do mostly nonfiction, but every now and then I switch to fiction. I always have a lot of ideas bouncing around in my head
A while ago I wrote this book, a nonfiction book, called “Best. State. Ever.” To research it I went to all these tourist attractions, but not the big ones, the little roadside attractions. I went to this one, the Skunk Ape museum, and it just sort of stuck in my mind.
I was walking around out in the Everglades with this guy, Dave Shealey. He’s the guy who saw the Skunk Ape and is selling the T-shirts.
I just kept thinking about this whole society existing out in the Everglades with this mythical monster out there. It just kept bouncing around in my mind as something you could write a story about.
- from the Tampa Bay Times interview

Ken Bortle was standing in the parking lot behind the Gallo Grande, waiting next to an overflowing dumpster baking in the late-afternoon Miami sun, emitting near-visible stench rays.

The power of this tale is the fact that nearly everyone on the planet knows the story, even though few have actually read the book. For the Victorian

The power of this tale is the fact that nearly everyone on the planet knows the story, even though few have actually read the book. For the Victorian reader, Stevenson hides the twist of the book until near the end. For those readers, Hyde and Jekyll were two men until Jekyll’s confessional letter sets them straight. - from the intro

He is not easy to describe. There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something down-right detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why. He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn’t specify the point. He’s an extraordinary looking man, and yet I really can name nothing out of the way. No, sir; I can make no hand of it; I can’t describe him. And it’s not want of memory; for I declare I can see him this moment.

Every time you remember an event from the past, your brain networks change in ways that can alter the later recall of the event. Thus, the next time you remember it, you might recall not the original event but what you remembered the previous time. - from the Northwestern article linked in EXTRA STUFF

“Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,” thought Alice; “but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!” - Alice in Alice in Wonderland

in one of my more wakeful moments, my eyes fell upon my hand. Now the hand of Henry Jekyll (as you have often remarked) was professional in shape and size; it was large, firm, white and comely. But the hand which I now saw, clearly enough, in the yellow light of a mid-London morning, lying half shut on the bedclothes, was lean, corded, knuckly, of a dusky pallor and thickly shaded with a swart growth of hair. It was the hand of Edward Hyde.

The weight on her chest lightens, her breathing slows. The ‘monkeys inside her head screech a little less loudly. That’s what is so brilliant about

The weight on her chest lightens, her breathing slows. The ‘monkeys inside her head screech a little less loudly. That’s what is so brilliant about certainties, even fleeting ones. They offer us respite.

The inspiration for Antonia and Jon inevitably stems from Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Antonia is that idealistic being, she does not hesitate to face the windmills, because she believes in a better world. Jon, on the other hand, is that pragmatist who has a dreamer hidden inside of him. - from the Hindustani interview

Just because we’re a unit created to avoid competition and secrets being kept between different police forces doesn’t mean we don’t repeat the same old mistakes.

A spasm of pure fear convulses Antonia’s body. Fear and loathing. Because she finally understands—with piercing, icy clarity—what has been going on from the very start.

Juan Gómez-Jurado was born in Madrid in 1977. His interest in literature led him to pursue a career in Information Science. No one at TVE, Canal Plus, La Voz de Galicia or COPE Radio Station —where he has worked— could have imagined what he would become in time. It wasn’t until 2006, when he published his novel, God’s Spy, that his talent became known, not only in Spain, but all across the globe.
Since then, he hasn’t stopped writing. Contract with God, The Traitor’s Emblem, The Legend of the Thief, The Patient, Scar... Year after year, his books keep on coming out. No time to rest. And his success keeps on rising and he keeps on breaking records. The trilogy made up of Red Queen, Black Wolf and White King, was the first to have all three books among the best-selling books in Spain simultaneously. In fact, Red Queen has been the most read book in Spain for two years in a row now, which translates into more than two million copies sold.

The spirit of a chief, you see, is a powerful thing. The skull became a head again when it was lifted from the grave . . . resurrected.”
“Resurrect

The spirit of a chief, you see, is a powerful thing. The skull became a head again when it was lifted from the grave . . . resurrected.”
“Resurrected?” she echoed.
“Alive again,” he said, his voice measured and grievously low, prolonging every word. “But not like it was before. Not like the old chief. It’s angry now that it’s been ripped from its rest. And ravenous. Hungry for revenge. It’ll eat anyone it encounters. It’ll tear flesh from bone.”
“How?” she said.
“It rolls, gathering mud and moss on its decaying flesh.”

Black bark to her sides and ash beneath her feet, she smelled the earthy odors of dirt, mud, burnt wood, and something so vile her stomach turned. It was the same smell the wind had wafted her way on the nights she’d been chased. Only the odor was stronger now. Inescapable.

She said Frog exemplified transformation. He entered life in one form and left it in another. From egg to tadpole, to tadpole with legs, to amphibian with tail, to tailless frog, he was never the same. He began life in water, only emerging once he was his true self. He symbolized change, rebirth, and renewal, and his spirit could bring rain.
Anna stared down at the ill-fated frog. The reservation was transforming. The asphalt beneath her feet was evidence of that. And yet the very symbol of change had become a victim of it. The absurdity didn’t escape her.

A Chicago native, Nick Medina is an author and college professor of public speaking and multicultural communication…Nick’s first short story was published in 2009 and he has since had dozens more published by West Pigeon Press, Dark Highlands, and UnEarthed Press, in addition to outlets in the U.S. and the U.K., such as Midwest Literary Magazine, The Washington Pastime, The Absent Willow Review and Underground Voices.

The dead could do nothing worse to him than the living had already done.

He couldn’t shake the inkling tha

The dead could do nothing worse to him than the living had already done.

He couldn’t shake the inkling that something was about to happen, even as the morning passed undisturbed.

The spring his family moved here from Foscoe, Blackburn’s father sent him to catch trout for supper. He’d been fishing on the edge of the Hampton property when Jacob appeared. Blackburn thought he’d come to run him off. Instead, Jacob guided him to the pasture’s best pools tent, and soon Blackburn’s stringer was heavy with fish. He showed Blackburn a pretend fort made of fallen branches, said that together they could build it up even bigger. It was only when Blackburn was about to head home that Jacob acknowledged his face. Does it hurt? Blackburn said no. I’m glad it doesn’t, Jacob had said.

When Rash was in high school, his father was hospitalized for depression, an illness that tormented him for years. Sue Rash was left alone to look after three children in a small Southern town, one that often felt to her eldest son like its own dwarf planet. But when the family needed support from their neighbors, they got it. “The whole town helped us,” Ron says. “It was a struggle that was never spoken of, but they knew. And people came through for us.” - from the Garden & Gun interview

Somethin's comin', I don't know what it is
But it is gonna be great

Ron Rash’s family has lived in the southern Appalachian Mountains since the mid-1700’s, and it is this region that is the primary focus of his writing. Rash grew up in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, and graduated from Gardner-Webb College and Clemson University. He holds the John Parris Chair in Appalachian Studies at Western Carolina University. Rash is the author of 9 books: The Night The New Jesus Fell to Earth (short stories), Casualties (short stories), Eureka Mill (poetry), and Among the Believers (poetry), Raising the Dead (poetry), One Foot in Eden (novel), Saints at the River (novel), The World Made Straight (2006), and Serena (2008). His poetry and fiction have appeared in over one hundred journals, magazines, and anthologies, including The Longman Anthology of Southern Literature, Western Wind, Sewanee Review, Yale Review, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Southern Review, Shenandoah and Poetry.

The difference between stalking and courtship is so thin, I thought then. It all depends on if the person likes you back.

The difference between stalking and courtship is so thin, I thought then. It all depends on if the person likes you back.

...there was nothing I could do to shake my stalker’s avid interest. It wasn’t even about me, although Marker Man would say it was. I was a shape to him, the outline of an object, filled in by him, interpreted by him. Not a person. I couldn’t stop him from coming after me, my friends, my family, because he stayed hidden, watching me, inventing me.

My daughter came to me in high school and was like, “Mom I think I’m on the autism spectrum…I’ve been reading about girls on the autism spectrum.” I’m like, “Honey, tell me why, what you think, because…that’s insane.” So she starts saying all these things and to every one of them she’s like, “well, girls on the autism spectrum do” this and this and this and this, and I would say, “Honey, that is normal. I was just like that. Every girl does that. OK?” No, they don’t! But the things she was describing were very very classic female autism, and seemed normal to me, because I was autistic…It’s cool that I was able to write Honor from a perspective of knowing what was really going on with her. - from Friends and Fiction interview

…this book is about gaze, like who is watching you and how does that change the power dynamic. - from the Friends and Fiction interview

I think that what really happened was I’d been trying to say something about my family history and the South, this land that I love, and I feel ambivalent about and I wrote a book called The Almost Sisters. And I’m not saying that I said it perfectly. I don’t think you can ever…the thing I was trying to say, I’ll never be able to say it better than in The Almost Sisters. I felt like a weight had been lifted. So I just started writing my next novel…I got a third of the way through the book and we were in negotiations and I was like this is a thriller. I’m writing a thriller by accident, and I called my agent. I was like “we can’t sign that contract. I’m writing a thriller. And she’s like “You’re writing a what?” - from Friends and Fiction interview

Q - How did you get into the head of a stalker and how did that affect you?

AHe made me need to take a bath. I didn’t want to write him. I didn’t plan to write him in there. I started writing the book. I knew it would be mostly Meribel’s story. Meribel narrates probably 80 percent of the book, but there are a few other voices that come in, and I did not plan to let that man talk, and then I was like, ok. He has to be more present than this. Like I thought people aren’t gonna understand how, why would she leave her town. They would have to understand. Because I knew how bad he was, but it wasn’t appearing on the page. So, then I wrote his letters. I was like maybe I’ll just show his letters, but even that was not enough. People aren’t gonna understand why she makes these extreme choices until they understand how much danger she’s actually in and how bad this is. But yeah, it was gross and icky and he’s not a good person. - from Friends and Fiction interview

”Who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” - Chico Marx in Duck Soup

The truth isn’t enough. Most people are

”Who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” - Chico Marx in Duck Soup

The truth isn’t enough. Most people aren’t even listening for it.

The aim of that book [The Ungrateful Refugee] was to really look back on my own experience, and what people go through now to make some sense of the modern displacement experience. One of the sections of the book is about asylum storytelling, and I had so many stories of people getting disbelieved for the stupidest reasons, and the way that the asylum officers listen to the stories. It was very shocking. I wanted to write a lot more about that and, with this book, I wanted to expand that out to just how the vulnerable are listened to, versus people who are very privileged. - from the Ms Magazine interview

For most migrants [asylum attorney Maleha Haq] explained, credibility isn’t the reason for rejection. In fact, the issue of credibility is cleverly avoided by using the claimant’s own lack of knowledge about the definition of a word. What is a refugee? Before he is believed, an asylum seeker must choose the right story out of many, the relevant part of a complicated life. It’s like being asked to cut a circular disk from a cylinder. You have many stacked circles, but if you cut at the wrong angle, you have an oval. You’ve failed to present the desired thing.

Despite all the talk of leadership and change-making, what you actually learn at Harvard Business School is how to be believed—how to be the ones people want to believe, feel safe believing, given their heuristic shortcuts.

…belonging is a performance with a script

The Reid Technique begins with an assumption of guilt. It was originally intended to be used only when the interrogator is absolutely certain of guilt. Even then, it was intended not to extract a confession that might condemn the suspect on its own (the technique is, after all, so torturous that even its creators didn’t believe it would cause an innocent person to confess, they seemed aware of that risk), but to uncover new, unknown details—intimate ones about the why and the how—that could then be corroborated. It was that supporting physical evidence that would convict the guilty—a body, a weapon, some real proof.

this variability in judicial standards is one of the greatest flaws of the American asylum system. Why should the weight of any kind of evidence vary by judge? Should one’s fate depend on the compassion or politics of the judge assigned? Should it vary by administration?...asylum grant rates go up and down based on who the attorney general is. That’s not just at the judge level but at the screening stage. The number of people found to have credible fear and entitled to be seen by a judge depends on political pressure.

I’d heard of curses—the storybooks are full of them—but this was the first time I’d seen one in action.

Yo

I’d heard of curses—the storybooks are full of them—but this was the first time I’d seen one in action.

You never know where the trapdoors are in your life, do you?

I love all the stuff that Robert E. Howard, Conan the Barbarian and some of the characters in the Edgar Rice Burroughs books, who would find these strange deserted cities, monsters and things. I thought it’s kinda like fairy tales. And I started to kinda get interested in that, and I thought maybe I could combine those two things, Maybe I could take the whole fairy tale riff. - from the Losers Club interview

…these books, particularly the Edgar Rice Burroughs books, like John Carter of Mars…they’re supposed to have this hero who’s like, muscular, you know, he played football in college and at the same time he’s got a brain, he’s handsome and got a cleft chin and all that good stuff and I thought I’d like to write a character like that. I’d like to write a character, who’s big, tough, tall, strong, who’s smart, but I want to give him a dose of reality. If he’s a kid, a younger man, who as a younger kid put dogshit on a bad teacher’s windshield, and glued somebody’s ignition shut. In other words I wanted him to have an anti-Disney kind of thing in there. - from the Losers Club interview

I tried to put in every goddam fairy tale I could think, including Ariel, the mermaid from the Disney film. - from the Losers Club interview

As a kid, I liked all the stories by Robert E. Howard, and I liked Edgar Rice Burroughs. One of the greatest things is The Land That Time Forgot. The story starts with a narrator who finds a manuscript on the beach. The narrator says, to you, the reader, read five pages and I will be forgotten. To me, that’s what fiction’s all about. Particularly fiction where a lot of stuff happens and where you’re kind of on an adventure, and you say to yourself, What I would like to do is for my readers to forget all their problems for a while, and just relax and get totally immersed in the story and get carried away to a different world. - from the Losers Club interview

The dead don’t walk. Except, sometimes, when they do.

It is a cliché to say that a building’s windows look

The dead don’t walk. Except, sometimes, when they do.

It is a cliché to say that a building’s windows look like eyes because humans will find faces in anything and of course the windows would be the eyes. The house of Usher had dozens of eyes, so either it was a great many faces lined up together or it was the face of some creature belonging to a different order of life—a spider, perhaps, with rows of eyes along its head.

The mushroom’s gills were the deep-red color of severed muscle, the almost-violet shade that contrasts so dreadfully with the pale pink of viscera. I had seen it any number of times in dead deer and dying soldiers, but it startled me to see it here.

It was a joyless scene, even with the end of the journey in sight. There were more of the pale sedges and a few dead trees, too gray and decayed for me to identify…Mosses coated the edges of the stones and more of the stinking redgills pushed up in obscene little lumps. The house squatted over it all like the largest mushroom of them all.

…so I was reading old pulp, basically going, is there anything here that grabs me that I can see a story in. And I happened on Usher and I was like, I haven't reread any Poe in a while. And I read Fall of the House of Usher and it's obsessed with rotting vegetation and fungus. And it's really short. And they don't explain hardly anything…I wanted to know what was wrong with Madeline Usher because you get buried alive, that is a problem. And so I started reading about catalepsy which is what it was diagnosed as at the time and also fungus, there was just so much about fungus and I'm like, okay, obviously these two must be linked somehow.; - from the LitHub interview

Gallacia’s language is . . . idiosyncratic. Most languages you encounter in Europe have words like he and she and his and hers. Ours has those, too, although we use ta and tha and tan and than. But we also have va and var, ka and kan, and a few others specifically for rocks and God… And then there’s ka and kan. I mentioned that we were a fierce warrior people, right? Even though we were bad at it? But we were proud of our warriors. Someone had to be, I guess, and this recognition extends to the linguistic fact that when you’re a warrior, you get to use ka and kan instead of ta and tan. You show up to basic training and they hand you a sword and a new set of pronouns. (It’s extremely rude to address a soldier as ta. It won’t get you labeled as a pervert, but it might get you punched in the mouth.)

DURING the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. - from The Fall of the House of Usher

T. Kingfisher is the vaguely absurd pen-name of Ursula Vernon. In another life, she writes children's books and weird comics, and has won the Hugo, Sequoyah, and Ursa Major awards, as well as a half-dozen Junior Library Guild selections

In June of 1896, Potter visited her mentor, George Massee, at Kew Gardens, where he showed her mushrooms grown under glass. He boasted that one of them “had spores three inches long.” Potter then jokes that they are both turning into mushrooms:

I opine that he has passed several stages of development into a fungus himself—I am occasionally conscious of a similar transformation

The dead don’t walk. Except, sometimes, when they do.

It is a cliché to say that a building’s windows look like eyes because humans will find faces in anything and of course the windows would be the eyes. The house of Usher had dozens of eyes, so either it was a great many faces lined up together or it was the face of some creature belonging to a different order of life—a spider, perhaps, with rows of eyes along its head.

The mushroom’s gills were the deep-red color of severed muscle, the almost-violet shade that contrasts so dreadfully with the pale pink of viscera. I had seen it any number of times in dead deer and dying soldiers, but it startled me to see it here.

It was a joyless scene, even with the end of the journey in sight. There were more of the pale sedges and a few dead trees, too gray and decayed for me to identify…Mosses coated the edges of the stones and more of the stinking redgills pushed up in obscene little lumps. The house squatted over it all like the largest mushroom of them all.

…so I was reading old pulp, basically going, is there anything here that grabs me that I can see a story in. And I happened on Usher and I was like, I haven't reread any Poe in a while. And I read Fall of the House of Usher and it's obsessed with rotting vegetation and fungus. And it's really short. And they don't explain hardly anything…I wanted to know what was wrong with Madeline Usher because you get buried alive, that is a problem. And so I started reading about catalepsy which is what it was diagnosed as at the time and also fungus, there was just so much about fungus and I'm like, okay, obviously these two must be linked somehow.; - from the LitHub interview

We used to joke that of the three of us, I could kill you up close, Tinbu could kill you from another ship, and Dalila could kill you from a differ

We used to joke that of the three of us, I could kill you up close, Tinbu could kill you from another ship, and Dalila could kill you from a different city three days later.

I’d grown up feeling terribly unusual; out of place and never at peace with the fate afforded young girls. In a hidden corner of my heart, I nursed embarrassing dreams. That I was not the child of my parents, but the daughter of a tribe of female warriors who flew upon winged horses. Or I was heir to a hidden sea kingdom below the waves, and the whispered sighs I heard from the water when we sailed and the strange lightning in the distance were not natural weather phenomena but magic, my true family calling to me. Then I grew into an adult. One who learned the hard way that if there was magic in this world, it could be as brutal and cunning as the worst monsters out of a fairy tale.

Easily one of the most enjoyable topics to research was criminal activity—specifically overwrought stories and urban legends about criminal activity—in the medieval world. All the cons, tricks, and poisons in this book are pulled from history: there’s actually a thirteenth century charlatan’s guide (recently translated into English by the Library of Arabic Literature) which discusses both the three cups game still used to swindle gullible tourists today and the numerous knock-out drugs Dalila employs. The guild Dalila hails from—the Banu Sasan—was also real, or as “real” as the fantastical odes recited about it were. - From the Fantasy Hive interview

Let’s talk about the night I accidentally married a demon.

So many of the characters in this book are coming to terms with past misdeeds or trying stick to a more righteous path and then you have this utterly selfish, sexy creature of chaos and trickery just waltz in and repeatedly betray them to save his own skin and spin “a better story.” And that’s the very point of him—he’s not human, he’s very much meant to be a relic of a forgotten age when people did tell stories of meddling, petty gods and monsters, a supernatural aspect that naturally feeds on human ambition and wouldn’t even understand why he’s expected to feel remorse for doing so. It was fun to create such a foil for Amina herself and really delve into the almost alien psyche of such a being. - from The Fantasy Hive interview

The largest pearl in the world; a miniature moon said to have been snatched from the sky by a lovelorn fairy and gifted to Queen Bilqis, who made it the centerpiece of her crown. A gem believed to bestow upon its owner countless wishes, supernatural sight, and unending good fortune.

I straightened up with care, pinching my brow to keep black spots from dancing before my eyes.

“What about you, Lady Dalila?” Noor asked. “Is there anyone back home you are eager to return to?”
Dalila picked at her teeth. “I had to abandon a time sensitive experiment with extremely promising indications as a knock-out gas.”
“For pain relief,” I amended quickly. “Dalila is our…healer.”
Noor’s brows rose slightly. “Ah, yes. Majed speaks frequently of how you ‘healed’ him when you first met.”
Dalila rolled her eyes. “It was hardly the worst of my poisons. There are some physicians who actually believe it beneficial to vomit blood every now and then. It balances the humors.”

When I started working on Amina, the goal I had for myself, and I think I wrote this in the author’s note at the end, was that I wanted to make it completely historically accurate—outside of the plot. I did a ton of research. There’s been an incredible amount of new work done on the medieval Indian Ocean, but you’re still looking at 12th-century texts. It’s almost 1,000 years ago, and there is a great limit to what we know. - from The Portalist interview

“Oh, those weren’t humans. Those were daevas.”
“What in God’s name is a daeva?”
He held up a hand. “You don’t want to know, trust me. More overdramatic creatures have never existed. And they’re not even the worst ones here. Everyone likes to complain about humans, but let me tell you…spend a couple centuries with the inhabitants of the unseen realms, and you’ll be aching to haunt a mortal latrine.”

I wanted to travel the world and sail every sea. I wanted to have adventures, to be a hero, to have my tales told in courtyards and street fairs where perhaps kids who’d grown up like me, with more imagination than means might be inspired to dream. Where women who were told there was only one sort of respectful life for them could listen to tales of another who’d broken away—and thrived when she’d done so.

…plugged in, navigating their vast library of original experiences and user – generated contact, his company could now map the reactions, decisions

…plugged in, navigating their vast library of original experiences and user – generated contact, his company could now map the reactions, decisions, even lingering, emotional responses of anyone who stuck around long enough to let their imagination build on the pre-existing foundation of an original experience – from what made a user crush to what made them cry out in pain, and reject the virtual experience altogether. It was a deep well. More than what made people tick, they were beginning to understand what those text amounted to. The way person would call might act. Even why.

…she had a weirdness about her that bordered on hostility.

…he’d made an awful thing. An awful place where you could never be alone. Where other people could climb in, touch everything. Turned you against yourself. Turn what you loved into something reprehensible. You could turn it back, but what happened to you once you’d seen it? once someone else had seen you see it?

I’m a Narrative Designer with a literary career. In addition to years of experience as a writer and designer for interactive games, I'm an experienced screenwriter and the author of seven books, published internationally and translated into multiple languages. My writing has also appeared in numerous publications, including Playboy Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, and McSweeney's, and it has been praised in numerous high profile venues, including the NY Times, New Yorker Magazine, LA Times, the Washington Post, Rolling Stone (France), Le Monde, and others. I'm a prolific writer and a confident collaborator with experience working across departments.