“I want to talk briefly about noticing, and how literature can make us better, or more serious, noticers. I will speak about three kinds of serious noticing—aesthetic noticing, human noticing, and metaphysical noticing. By aesthetic noticing, I mean the function that poetry and fiction have to help us see the world more closely and carefully—to see

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No one wants to be told what they already know. What is needed is not just a novel that addresses not just contemporary conditions but the effect those conditions have on our own self-image, the ways in which we justify our own actions while all the while a great, unstoppable force carries us forward. It takes a brave, resourceful writer to do

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I fear they’ll miss is not literature’s beauty but its resistance. The way it trains the mind to slow down, to reflect, to tolerate ambiguity. To reside in the discomfort of the interstitial and be ok with it. The way it sharpens perception by refusing to simplify. The world they are entering is freighted with superficiality and false certainty

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