The first time I’d read it, at 11, it was about a boy, because I was young. The second, at 19, it was about love, because I was in love. This time around, it was about death. And because it was about death, it was about everything else, too, juxtaposed with death.
Creative non-fiction: regardless of where one stands on the debate of which of those two modifiers rules the other — and to what degree — for everyone, there is a line.
Not reading Roussel is similar to never having eaten a pomegranate: never having pulled apart the brittle skin, peeled back the bitter membrane, bit into each seed for a tiny squirt of juice, ending up with a red-stained shirt.
Epstein’s discerning eye for tantalizing details could have earned him a lucrative career as a gossip columnist in another life, but Gossip thrives on meatier substances.
At one juncture we are told, or warned, that ‘the world abrades your finesse away.’
John Berger begins with one seemingly simple question: “Where does the impulse to draw something begin?”
Writers known for a certain tone and style often struggle to pull off anything outside their box, the literary equivalent of typecast actors.
For Maxwell, the past is a single fixed point, discontinuous from the present, and the center around which his imagination revolves, like a talisman or a totem.
That’s the thing about Florida: in the best scenario, it wouldn’t have people in it. The Florida I loved as a child, the one that I still love as an adult, exists uneasily alongside human beings.
This is roughly what he meant by liberalism: it is, or ought to be, an acknowledgment of complexity and difficulty and an awareness of the objections that can be raised against it.