All articles by this author
May 26, 2018
"You know, everything that we’ve been doing together actually is the plot of ‘Goodbye, Columbus.’ "
But it turns out that I love those books. They have that same quality of being unrepentant. And the idea that you can write a novel that very clearly, unabashedly, unrepentantly has autobiographical elements, a novel that says, “What, fuck you, who even cares? This is what a novel is, and you can like it or you can get off the bus”—I appreciated that.
November 10, 2017
A sack of oat flour was mysteriously displayed on the front desk.
The traffic in Lagos is famously bad. The local driving culture dictates tailgating, honking, flashing of brights, left turns into oncoming traffic, passing on the right, and shouting (but no cursing or lewd gestures—not in such a religious country). It isn’t rare to see a car casually reversing down an on-ramp, a motorcycle scattering pedestrians on a sidewalk, or a truck inching over a highway median to make an improbable u-turn.
I had never had a coregasm and my sexual expectations conformed to widely held, government-sanctioned ideals.
February 20, 2013
Both Maria Wyeth and Katniss Everdeen have had nasty experiences that have demystified the empty narratives of success.
In America, Practical Criticism came to be known as “close reading,” and later came to be known as New Criticism.
Wilma hit Miami in the middle of the night, and by the time I woke the city was silent.
He was directed to take a second test, one he could only recall later as assessing one’s aptitude in “general culture.” This, too, he passed. Finally the government told the remaining fifteen students what the tests were for. With an air of great benevolence and gravity, a functionary from the Ministry of Work told Gabriel he would be working in the movies.
