March 2008
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"I like working with memory. Not the truth of memory, but how characters remember an event, either truthfully or not. Something happened to us in the past, and we think we know how it happened, but over twenty years it completely changed. When Michael, my boyfriend, first read it, he thought that people might see it as something of a weird kind of sequel to Mysterious Skin. The characters here resemble the characters from that book, and again, it deals with how the secrets from characters’ pasts shape their present."
by
Mark Doten
"Jane [Bowles] was always the most annoying person at the party -- loud, louche, stagy, intoxicated, 'inappropriate,' but perversely attractive -- the jolie-laide -- the one the other women rolled their eyes at. She fell on just the other side of the fine line between Mae West and train wreck. The more attentive and/or insecure among us might have looked at her and thought, 'There but for the grace of God…' because she systematically spat on the false gods of femininity, and not in a discreet behind-the-hand kind of way. She was the uneasy 'Was I...? Did I...?' feeling of the morning after a long party, that grotesque unfilled blank. Or that’s what I’ve made her out to be for my purposes."
by
Kate Greenstreet
The truth is that sometimes sex -- especially earnest portrayals of sex, especially earnest portrayals of sex in front of the boys from the football team and your tight-lipped biology teacher -- is just squicky. And pathetic. And bathetic. There’s something canine or simian, in a bad way, about our drippy urgency to rub our uglies against something until we come. Having a human body will kill each of us eventually, no matter what, so we might as well enjoy it. But it’s not for the squeamish. Western culture, in fact, has largely developed around the tension between revulsion and fascination, between being grossed out and turned on.
by
Elizabeth Bachner
"Maybe I’m being ignorant, but it’s strange to me that people “study” writing or art. I think the most important thing in literary writing is having something to write about, otherwise it doesn’t mean shit how good a writer you are. Not that I know what I’m doing. Art is also a privilege, and most of the things I’ve done have been driven by necessity."
by
Angela Stubbs
Clones are replicated from a single parent. Because Dolly had two parents, she was not strictly speaking a clone, but a unique mixture (hence the book’s title). She defied what most scientists thought they knew: “Dolly was supposed to be a biological impossibility because before her birth it was assumed that all cells ‘commit’ as they develop, becoming particular kinds of cells, such as hair cells, skin cells, liver cells, bone cells, or heart cells.”
by
Barbara J. King
"There's another piece [in Mortified: Love is a Battlefield] we call "Head Games" and it's a pretty dirty piece, although there are no bad words in it -- it's unbleepable. It's by a girl who was this smart know-it-all, the girl in school who everyone turned to for advice, no matter what: homework, boys, parents. And her best friend was about to give her very first blowjob... we can say that on Bookslut, I'm guessing?"
by
Liz Miller
"The writing is maybe a realistic surrealism, if that makes any sense. I chose the word “somnambulism,” or sleepwalking, for the subtitle because I thought that it got at that feeling we often have of moving dreamlike through landscapes that are very much our waking, realistic ones, and our doing so in a sort of intensely experienced and even visionary way."
by
Jeff VanderMeer
"Making sentences is creating jewelry. I love to fashion a good paragraph, so coming up with such a book as Laura Warholic is not only a serious daily task but surely an amazing self-indulgence. I especially have to enjoy what I do, as I know no one reads my books. I believe the first edition was 6,500. The population of a few small, sleepy dorps on Cape Cod where, by the way, no one knows of my new book. My librarian has not heard of it."
by
Sean P. Carroll
