Victor LaValle
Victor LaValle
Victor LaValleis an American author who was raised in the Flushing and Rosedale neighborhoods of Queens, New York. He is the author of a short-story collection, Slapboxing with Jesus and three novels, The Ecstatic, Big Machine and The Devil in Silver. LaValle writes fiction primarily, though he has also written essays and book reviews for GQ, Essence Magazine, The Fader, and The Washington Post, among others...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth3 February 1972
CountryUnited States of America
I weighed 25 stone, and I didn't stand nine feet tall, so the weight didn't sit well on me. As big as a house? No. I was as big as an estate.
I wanted to write a story set in the Lovecraftian universe that didn't gloss over the uglier implications of his worldview.
I spend lots of time on the Web, some of it even useful.
I know that many authors say editors don't edit anymore, but that's not been true in my experience.
I had a pretty bad time when I was an undergraduate at Cornell University. I failed out of school. I was much, much heavier.
Fear warps our understanding of reality and even our ability to see reality clearly.
Every era needs a genre through which it understands itself.
Booksellers are the bartenders of the reading world. People share thoughts and interests they keep private from others in their lives.
What's beautiful about Godzilla is, of course, it's in every way a symbol of Japan dealing with the aftermath of the atomic bombs being dropped on them, and their ideas of how they're affected by it.
Whether it was H. P. Lovecraft's doomed towns or Shirley Jackson's lonely, looming 'The Haunting of Hill House,' the boondocks had all the fun. As a black kid in Queens, New York, I couldn't have felt more removed.
The best monsters are our anxieties given form. They make sense on the level of a dream - or a nightmare.
Clothes are a kind of uniform. A nun's habit, a surgeon's scrubs, a cop's uniform. People often say that when they put on a certain uniform, they actually think of themselves differently.
When I finished graduate school, I had a master's of fine arts from a prestigious institution, a manuscript that would eventually become my first published book - and almost no marketable skills.
There's the wonder of being able to do research from your own living room, of course. I do find that my biggest research issue, though, is how to frame my questions.