Biography

I do think that we all draw limits and I feel like part of the work of an artist is it shouldn't be fun. This shouldn't be comfortable. I'm not looking to make people feel unsafe, but I am looking to make people feel uncomfortable.

We're accelerated. We don't have much time anymore for what we call spaces of deliberation. Spaces where we can sit around and think at a human pace about ourselves and our lives, and even things like what is the future. A human rhythm where you can think about the past, the present and the future at the same time. I do think that books are invaluable as a reservoir of what we call the human space. And this is why I think that, even if they're threatened, the work that they do has an incalculable merit.

We hide so well. This is the bottom line: how hidden is male subjectivity? Name five books where male subjectivity is produced in an honest way.

I think there's something really painful about your identity being entirely composed of ghosts. For me, I didn't want to be this kid whose Dominicanness was something caught utterly in the past, is an abstraction, the thing that I write about. Instead I wanted it to be, first and foremost, a thing that I lived.

[re favorite episode of The Twilight Zone (1959)] I grew up in the shadow of a dictatorship, and even more immediately, with an older brother who was everyone's favorite, who could get away with almost anything, and so the episode that rocked me was "It's a Good Life" [based on the Jerome Bixby short story about a 3-year-old boy who's really a monster controlling his small town]. Bixby was a genius, and he dramatized the "banality of evil" with such sinister effortlessness.