It’s as easy as it sounds in my grandparents’ letters to live a normal life under an authoritarian regime. You love or fall out of love, you go on summer adventures, defend a dissertation. The trains keep running, cows keep giving milk.

Watching Chinese immigrants shouting curt orders to Black workers in their newly learned English was often like observing a failed game of telephone, as the workers’ faces bore quiet offense.

“Writing fiction is like controlled daydreaming, whereas writing nonfiction is more like putting together a complicated three-dimensional puzzle.”

“I wasn’t willing to participate in swindling others into believing that Hungary was open to foreigners…”

“The desert tests the faith of even the most committed. When I received orders to deploy here, I imagined sand dunes and shimmering heat.”

“This is the Delta, where you can look and look but find no visible demarcation line between the salt waters and the fresh waters.”

“It's hot here. I don't get high anymore; I don't need to. The perpetual heat and the laziness do about the same; out here every afternoon on the tower, feet dangled over the edge, in the haze, and that column of smoke out there in the distance, that's Perú already.”

I suppose in every discipline, the threat of artistic integrity being tainted by money is inescapable. I’ve been thinking about this alongside something…about how the imagination is not free, and there is no version of it that exists in a vacuum, untouched by the hierarchical structures of society.

“Time seems not so much to progress as to waft through each novel… solitude enables past, present and future to press in like ghosts.”