Lara Vapnyar discusses the “mysterious Russian soul”, childhood, and how she learned she is a powerful writer.

"I loved that, no matter where the characters went underground, they came out into the same space..I could see a double-paged spread showing a huge old fashioned attic — full of the different entry points. To me, the story said, whatever you think you know about the rules of life, forget it, ain’t necessarily true."  

I began reading Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn, as Told by a Friend (1947), in mid-2016, casually. I’d bought the book by mistake several years prior, thinking it was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s version—that is, the seminal German Faust. I am not the first to have confused the two authors.

You don’t read Ben Lerner’s writing. You read Ben Lerner’s mind. His immense, contorted, self-effacing, hilarious intellect propels his narratives. Sure, his novels have characters, plots, themes.

Certain writers assault you with their intelligence, not as, or only as, a performance, but rather out of necessity: they simply cannot stop thinking. Humor has long been the balm of metacognition, laughter a scaffolding over the abyss.