Essential and interesting year-end book lists.
“‘GLOW,’ my fiction story from the BLACK PUNK NOW anthology is, on the surface, about a Black teen who’s into punk—but it’s really about identity, coming-of-age, and learning some ugly truths about “the American experiment.””
“…thanks to the films of Quentin Tarantino — and Spike Lee, Steven Soderbergh, Paul Thomas Anderson, Sofia Coppola, Wes Anderson, and Martin Scorsese — I wound up spending my formative late teens and early twenties finding a lot of revelations through their soundtracks.”
“For Dazzling, I had to evoke much of them feeling of what we used to call ‘chesting’ things – bearing things, not crying, you know, the stone in the throat, the ache in your stomach, the tightness behind your eyes”
“When I sat down at my desk I played music until the music was weather; until the weather wrote itself onto the page. This is what the writing felt like.”
“Some sorceries can’t be ducked or beaten, or fought to better than a draw. But if you survive the first rounds, and are granted time enough, you can learn to parley with them, turning a nightmare that must be passively endured to something more like a lucid dream that can be shaped and shared. That could be a definition of all art.”
“Poetry is a literary form that plays with interval, establishing meters and rhythms, interrupting them, finding a swing between anticipation and realization. To ensure that a poem manipulates time effectively, I need to be able to feel what is being manipulated. Sometimes, I find that if I want a concrete sense of time, I need to lean on a steady groove…”
“Weak in Comparison to Dreams has a really unusual playlist. Partly because there is music in it—literally. There is sheet music in the novel itself. It’s all for piano, and most of it is playable.”
“Needful as I was for a soundtrack to deploy during the daily affairs of my life, song remained the one street I could play within.”
“The stories in Idiot Men focus on—wait for it…men who are idiots. They make poor choices, stupid decisions and generally shoot themselves in their respective, figurative feet as their narratives unfold. “
My favorite short fiction collections of the year.