Caleb Crain on Whether Violence Always Wins
Briefly

She's alone without yet having admitted to herself that she's alone, and unconsciously she's turning the furniture (and the animals, tame and wild) in her home into a kind of company, and the rituals of her daily routine into quiet theatre.
With these new crime stories, I may have been responding in part to the darkness that was descending (at least until a few weeks ago) over the national political landscape. I've also struggled personally for a long time with a sense that the world is a dark place, and maybe I was just ready to try writing about that.
I lived in Texas only until I was six, and for the most part I don't have an accent anymore, but Texan is probably still the language my operating system is written in. A certain kind of talk is highly valued in Texas. It's hard to characterize. Intelligent without being marked as intellectual.
Read at The New Yorker
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