One element is always on display at this hour: the spectacle of childless, two-income professional couples, one of whom will be resentfully walking their expensive, neurotic, designer dog, taken out each evening to wee on the border plantings and scurry back inside. [Read more]
Reading one’s own work after a long interval gives one a certain distance. It has become, in a sense, strange. I am moved and distracted, I speed up and slow down, as with any reading. Like any other reader, I puzzle over its meaning. [Read more]
Or perhaps these are the inevitable themes of a certain kind of writing in a certain kind of era. The narrator of the story of the Venus on the Malecón believes that a Time of Terror calls for the most elementary of reconstructions: “primitive materials . . . life histories, fictions, collections.” [Read more]