This feels like an important story to write. For one thing, it offers a fresh angle on the apartheid story, through the eyes of a young orthodox Jew. But also, it looks at powerlessness in the face of a system you feel you can’t change and how young people turn to extreme solutions when they experience that impotence.
Marisa Silver, who made her fiction debut in The New Yorker when she was featured in that magazine’s first “Debut Fiction” issue, is the author of two novels and two story collections, her most recent collection, Alone With You, published by Simon & Schuster earlier this year.
Silver’s first story collection, Babe in Paradise, was named [...]
I got a dog last week. My first dog ever, and this never should have happened. For one thing, I dislike dogs.
Roberto Bolaño’s final novel 2666, released posthumously, is a sprawling literary tome. It’s the kind of work that possesses a staggering amount of angles, gliding through time periods, characters, both widespread and intimate violence, sexuality, and Bolaño’s expertise, the imagining and dismantling of artists.
I’d been half-hoping that someone like that might turn up. What a wonderful surprise this would be for him… these orderly grave beds, the paths so clean, this fence so nice and upright…
The cherries of our cigarettes pulse like exit signs outside the front door, drive away flies.
They won’t ask realistic questions because they will be too shocked with style to fixate on content.
She took the gnawed white pencil with the heart-shaped eraser and
marked the wall calendar for that day with a V, pouting. “You were
very mean to me today.” Her: in fur collar and short hair with
plummy lower lip stuck out like that actress she liked.
He moved from the tiny kitchen to the tiny living room, beyond [...]
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