I think whenever a writer sits down to write, she’s approaching the page with the accumulation of all she’s read coming to bear.

Her latest English-language translation follows a young man as he rises through the restaurant ranks while trying to preserve his integrity as a cook.

This 2018 publication of the novel brings closure to a 50-year saga, coinciding with the height of the #MeToo movement, which has given women everywhere renewed strength through common vulnerabilities.

On Sydney Taylor’s Lower East Side, no one needed to be embarrassed of their Jewishness, and American patriotism existed side by side with Jewish life.

I think as humans we need to decide which is important to us—the divisions or the sustenance.

One can imagine an editor asking the author to go easier on the reader, provide signals or chapter breaks that allow for full stops and restarts. I like to imagine Weiner refusing absolutely.

Books had always been a language my mother and I shared when she was well. And yet—once I was alone in her apartment with a stack of boxes, tasked with this move, and her books were all mine to do with as I liked, I knew one thing right away: I didn’t want them.

The desire to tell outweighed the fear of telling. Also Chuck Palahniuk dared me. In a parking lot. True story.

Those workshops were night blind. Anything featuring black people, they reacted as if they needed a seeing-eye dog or special guide to walk them through it. It was really frustrating and tiring. The things I needed them to focus on — plot, point of view, setting — you know, the elements of fiction — came second to their need to know about the “type” of people I was writing about, or the “type” of place.

Perhaps it is only fitting that the fire should be on our minds, then, as the new administration’s infringements on the rights of immigrants, workers, women, and the poor manifest themselves daily.

It doesn’t matter so much where you place your faith, but that you place it at all: in God, in the person standing next to you, or the dog at your feet.

When we consider “life-changing” advances we tend to think of things like electricity or automobiles. Birth control never makes the list. But the ability for women to take a pill and choose when or whether to get pregnant is revolutionary.

There is a vibrant, different literary world outside New York — and some incredible work being done — and I think the presumption that the best of literature is in New York or that New York is the center of literary life is in fact damaging.

Gustine treats her characters — and thus her readers — with dignity and compassion. Our complications, she demonstrates with each story, may drive us and often damage us, but they’re important.