Inevitably over the holidays, someone asks you what you're doing in a graduate program. My standard answer is, "I'm a writer who doesn't want to die in a ditch." That probably sounds like a joke, but …

I've attached a video here that many of you have probably viewed, or if you haven't, you're just too ADD-addled to watch it: the video shows Bill Murray reading poetry. In case this isn't already …

I was driving by a restaurant I'd been meaning to try (Julia's Bistro? Sheba? The Breakfast Club?) when a pothole jostled my car and brain. Houston is known for its potholes. Recovering from the …

This week it's Thanksgiving and like any other sap in the country, I can't help but muse about all the wonderful and touching things that I've come across in my life. As a writer, one of these …

A few weeks ago, I was in New York for a wedding and I stopped by the apartment of a former professor of mine to catch up. We talked for a while about what he was teaching, the students in his …

A recent article in New York Magazine describes Full Fathom Five, a project created and headed by James Frey, author of A Million Little Pieces and a couple novels. The article is written by a young …

I've been thinking about influence lately. And perhaps partly because of a couple recent posts on this blog, I've been thinking about influence in the context of gender. Not too long ago I was in …

Perhaps like many others, I grew up listening to the music of my parents. There were, of course, some minor deviations--I clearly remember listening to a popular song by the Filipino rapper, Andrew …

My name, David Tomas Martinez, is the Mexican equivalent of John Smith, and like many of my friends, I played sports growing up. In my neighborhood, running the football got dances with the prettiest …

Maybe it's because I've been watching too much Jersey Shore , but lately I've been thinking about the world in terms of manliness. Don't you judge me. On Jersey Shore, the guidos try to figure out …

For the past year or so, The Paris Review Interviews has been hanging out in my Amazon shpping cart, but at $40, the price of the four-volume boxed set was a little too steep for my graduate school …

Last week, I showed my Mad Men-virgin friend (yes, they still exist) the pilot episode, the one in which Pete tells Peggy in Don Draper's office that it wouldn't kill her to show her ankles more. …

Some girls gave blowjobs in the bathroom stall, and some girls were star basketball players, but I had no distinguishing traits in high school.

London is an international idea and a historical fact and a little piece of our youth like a stallion which stood about for some years standing still within those some years …

  In fact, wir sein ready, Was das anconzernt. —Kurt M. Stein, Die Schönste Lengevitch , 1925 being on an island, having a child, writing, and having a child as the reverse of insularity, namely: …

Got to be starting              some thing. My father used to                                  catch and …

Slower & slower & then, for one/ Whole month, it spun so fast/ It was impossible to be jealous/ Or afraid or lost. Pants flew/ Off of strangers. Lapdogs floated/ Away, zigzagging …

One thing was for sure: Elise couldn't be Robert's void wife. On the day the void was scheduled to hit San Francisco, she hid from him in the ruin of the Sutro Baths. She gazed out at the Pacific …

Schisma For ten euro, you’ll rest easy aboard  Posidonia , the smoothest ship in all of Schisma. Happily we’ll sail to Kalydon, just twenty minutes across the sea, and through the main gate of …

The horoscope writer kills herself on a Tuesday. It is, by coincidence, the day the weekly paper comes out. Townspeople read her column and find it mundane but also uncanny. Here, some of them feel, …