It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our…

“Where do you get your ideas?' people are always asking authors they admire, which I’ve always thought was another way of asking, 'How did…

— Suzanne Berne

Now being 41 and looking back on my career... It became natural for me to revisit Inglewood and to revisit the coming-of-age movie, but…

— Rick Famuyiwa

We have the bad habit, some of us, of looking back to a time - almost any time will do - when society was…

— Katherine Anne Porter

Dagwood Bumstead was a great unrecognized hero of American literature. He showed up every day, he got knocked down every day, he never got…

— James L. Brooks

“Sociologically, politically, psychologically, spiritually, it was never enough for James Baldwin to categorize himself as one thing or the other: not just black, not…

— Aberjhani

“I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize…

— Mark Twain

Here is one of the fundamental defects of American fiction--perhaps the one character that sets it off sharply from all other known kinds of…

— H. L. Mencken

What had brought me to New York in the autumn of 1972 was a letter of recommendation written by Norman Mailer, the author of…

— James Wolcott

“Don Raimondo tells me what he can’t tell them. “The emptiness on the surface of a wall left by a sold bookshelf is the…

— Erri DeLuca

Throughout African-American literature, the writer has, in a sense, been burdened by the necessity of pleading the case for the whole race. For example,…

— Glenn Ligon

I think most Native American literature is unreadable by the vast majority of Native Americans. Generally speaking Indians don't read books. It's not a…

— Sherman Alexie

Héctor Tobar's accomplished first novel affords a perspective that is overdue and urgently needed in North American literature- -an insider's vision of L.A. as…

— Stuart Dybek

Janet Mock's honest and sometimes searing journey is a rare and important look into la vida liminal, one that she manages to negotiate remarkably…

— Raquel Cepeda

“I have seen them stagger out of their movie palaces and blink their empty eyes in the face of reality once more, and stagger…

— John Fante

American literature was enriched with Men Who Loved Allison … Of the actual and eventual worth of this romance I cannot pretend to be…

— James Branch Cabell