"Is this pretentious? I don’t care, whatever. I read Moby Dick in college and it dissolved my brain and re-grew me a new one, and I read it again this year and let me tell you it lives up to the hype! Is anything as gorgeous as Melville's prose? “For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life”? Are you kidding me, Herman??????"

"As anyone who has ever picked up a pair of knitting needles can attest to, knitting is a laborious love. When a pair of socks can take weeks to knit, and a blanket months (or even years), there’s something slightly sacrilegious about a book of shorts about knitting. But somehow these writers capture the essence of hours spent stitching, without the expected verbose prose. The third story written by Andre Dubus III is a particular favorite of mine — capturing both the historical and personal legacy of knitting in a short heartfelt gem."

"My admiration for Pessoa goes beyond reading his prose. I am in awe of his invention of the heteronym which allows him to be a multitude of authors. Pessoa creates different authors with different languages, voices, putting forth different, often contradictory representations of the world. His strategy is not to be confused with appropriation. All voices/authors are original and distinct. The lesson I took from Pessoa is that I must constantly distance myself from the activity of making so that I can observe my work from a vantage point other than my own."

"Porter accomplishes an extraordinary amount in a few pages. She addresses the horrors of war from a woman’s perspective; she touches on the difficult a terrain a working woman must navigate in a man’s world; she creates a desirable male, describing his physical allure from a female point of view: quite rare in most fiction. But most astonishing, in chronicling Miranda’s near death experience and her reluctant return to life, she describes the indescribable and deals with the most profound human issues: life, death, identity, in shatteringly beautiful prose."

"From the first lines of Celan’s “Todesfuge”: Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown/ we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night/ we drink and we drink it Celan’s poems are terrifying and beautiful, many of them reflect his experience of the Holocaust. His parents died in a concentration camp, he was imprisoned in a labor camp. Language is Celan’s tool of combat and survival, and of the evocation of memory. I have always preferred poetry and prose to fiction. Poetry condenses."