This essay gave me my first taste of the singular sense of peace that arises from satisfactorily explaining things to myself through writing, and I think I’ll be chasing that magic for the rest of my life.

silently watching for the arrival,

the most golden mortise of after
afternoon sunlight, Such are the
vicissitudes of life, my girl
fingers tracing the glass of here,
past there, in between green-blue

waves,

The Booker Prize shortlist this year is unprecedented: four of the six novels are debuts, the majority are by women, and half are by Black authors. No straight white men. Nobody is English. (Douglas Stuart, the only British author on the list, was born and raised in Scotland.) By most measures, it is the most diverse shortlist in the history of the prize. Depending on who you are, it is either a welcome surprise or pandering to the scourge of political correctness.

She made me look up Mr. Winstead, forty. Like his famous storm—I see I had started circling Larry long before I found him. Why had it taken almost four years to bother tracing him? I hadn’t believed the thing really happened—unassisted human flight. But, too, maybe this very delay strengthened me into the writer-interviewer-detective needed for landing such a tale? 

Now I can finally leave Falls with a clear conscience. For years I’ve been here, listening so hard I couldn’t hear. The best true stories? They are the most unlikely. I learned that here in Falls. 

The star that looks awry upon the sinner
orients the temple. Mother Kate places
the wafer in my hands, a story
about a body.

The characters in a given DeLillo novel are part of a common emanation, a metaphysical idea about language parsed through—and, crucially, by—language itself. It is not just the givers and claimers of names but the names themselves that assume the attitude of Adam. When Adam eats fruit from the tree of knowledge, he realizes that he is naked. When language becomes similarly self-aware, it realizes that its music is as essential as its meaning, and this is the core subject—the deep truth—of all DeLillo’s novels.

For both sparring and novel writing, I have found no solution to fear. Experience has not helped ease my fear when I am sparring. I feel the same tightness in my stomach each time I step into the ring. I am working on a new long-form project now, and I know that period of fear will descend at some point in the process. I have decided that the presence of fear is, more often than not, a good thing. Fear is really only a problem when it derails our ability to work, undermines our sense of well-being, or when it compels us to make fear-based decisions. Once while sparring, compelled forward by my fear of getting trapped in a corner, I lunged at my opponent with a messy three-punch combo and was countered by a crisp and powerful jab, resulting in my first bloody nose.

If I speak of the fire at the center
of my palms, would you let me
touch you with them? My hands?

I had a friend I loved for twenty-five years, and then the earth opened between us, and now we have not spoken in twenty-five years. But nearly every week I dream of her, so there is this sense, for me at least, that we still know and love each other, but only late in the night, behind closed eyes.

One of the men had gone to the bathroom and was returning, taking his can from the top of the ATM near the back hall. Martine was stretching when her arm hit him as he was passing by. He dropped his can and let out a call, and Martine said Oh shit, buddy, I’m sorry. The man said Fucking bitch, and Martine stood up so fast that the table shook. She was taller than him, he looked up at her with a face of tight, white fear, and Vasek reached out for her wrist.