I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel.

But I know how sadness can exert its own gravity, growing more powerful the longer it holds you.

a figure standing at the edge of a sprawling forest tasked with mapping that forest with such precision that anyone who sees the map will feel themselves transported into the territory. The figure can see the snowy peaks in the distance and might conjure some theories as to what lies between them and those peaks—pine trees, foothills, a ravine with

And we are plagued by dead language and dead stories that serve people whose aim is nothing short of a dead world.

They were raised under the story that the Jewish people were the ultimate victims of history. But they had been confronted with an incredible truth—that there was no ultimate victim, that victims and victimizers were ever flowing.

think that what we were being taught was less a body of knowledge than a way to be in the world: orderly, organized, attentive to direction. There is nothing wrong with developing those skills—in fact, I’ve learned the hard way how useful they can be. What is wrong is their fetishization, the way they were allowed to outrank the actual body of

the sin of abstraction, which was, after all, the very sin I’d perpetrated in my work.

It is about writers to come—the boundaries of their imagination, the angle of their thinking, the depth of their questions. I

In a place like this, your mind expands as the dark end of your imagination blooms, and you wonder if human depravity has any bottom at all, and if it does not, what hope is there for any of us?