Stacey D'Erasmo

“I was influenced by big, strong voices - writers like Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, Jane Bowles; gay writers like Ed White, Michael Cunningham, Allen Hollinghurst; and contemporary lesbia...”

“Royalty mostly seem like members of some anachronistic faith, like the Amish, peculiar in gilded buggies.”

“Readers, like writers, are essentially amoral. Arm's length will never do. We want to get closer.”

“'The Girls,' by Lori Lansens, is a ballad, a melancholy song of two very strange, enchanted girls who live out their peculiar, ordinary lives in a rural corner of Canada.”

“One of the first times that I went into a book store and saw a bunch of my books, my impulse was to put them all under my coat and run away so that no one else could see them, even though, o...”

“There are more clocks than ever - clocks on computers, on cell phones, on televisions, on any screen available, telling time to the digital second - but they all seem to matter less.”

“Prior to the institutionalization of standard time, clocks were set using local meridians or local mean time, and they varied widely.”

“On a deeper level, there's a level of privacy that I need in order to work, and if there's been a time when there's been a lot of publicness in my life, it can be a little bit difficult to s...”

“As lightly toned by reality as the women on 'Sex and the City,' the bold, soigne characters on 'The L Word' suggest that L is also for limerence, that rapturous state of early love when the...”

“Shelley Jackson's 'Half Life' is the textual equivalent of an installation, a multivocal, polymorphous, dialogic, dystopian satire wrapped around a murder mystery wrapped around a bildungsro...”

“The spirits of Havelock Ellis, Magnus Hirschfeld and Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebbing waft through the text to lend 'The Third Sex' an air of scientific authority.”

“One of the many pleasures of 'Versailles' is the way in which it seems to emanate not only from the vexed inner being of Marie Antoinette but from the interstices between what we imagine of...”

“The songs in 'Wonderland' don't have a melodic life for me - I'm not a musical person - but they have an emotional life, an emotional echo perhaps.”

“What is the distance between here and there, between now and then, between right and wrong? In Greg Baxter's pellucid first novel, 'The Apartment,' it may be simply the length of a day - but...”

“You can conclude from the glossy surfaces of 'The L Word' that L stands for latte or Lexus and stop there. Or you can notice that in some of its less flashy moments, the show has staked a cl...”

“The knot of intimacy at the center of 'Ten Thousand Saints' is the friendship between Teddy McNicholas and Jude Keffy-Horn.”

“In her previous novels, Maggie O'Farrell has often measured the distance between intimates and the unexpected intimacy of distance - geographic, temporal, cultural. In 'The Hand That First H...”

“Emotional grandeur, rendered in the vernacular, has been Mona Simpson's forte. In her novels, 'Anywhere but Here,' 'The Lost Father' and 'A Regular Guy,' Simpson wrote wide and long and high...”

“The railroads needed standardized time; as a result, the technology of train travel shaped the way everyone gets up, eats, goes to sleep, calculates age, and, perhaps of no small importance,...”

“If we are indeed nostalgic for the weight of clock time, it is worth remembering that the standardized time that most of us know has only been around since the mid-nineteenth century. It was...”