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
For as long as I could remember, the person in E23 pasted the same Halloween decoration, a witch with a giant wart on her crone's nose, but whenever kids rang, the tenant wouldn't answer. At first, kids figured they'd just missed the guy: bad timing. But it seemed impossible that all of us missed him every year.
Education is gathering information and reading... No human being can thrive without some form of education. How you get it is up to you - the important thing is that you get it.
'Dark Gods,' T. E. D. Klein's book of four novellas, felt like a godsend - even if it came from a deformed god, one that lurked beneath our sidewalks.
Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' was a story about the fear of immigration; the bad old bloodsucker swooping in from Eastern Europe and also preying upon 'our' vulnerable women.
As a 13-year-old fan of horror fiction, I hadn't seen too many cities in the literature I loved. It was always small towns, or backwoods locales, or maybe the suburbs.
You can't write a story about a mental hospital in the United States without facing the grand example of 'Cuckoo's Nest.'
When I find the right information, the Web is a blessing; when I don't, it's a distraction.
Try imagining James Joyce not writing about being a Catholic.
No matter where you go, poor people have the capacity to endure. Some people even compliment us on it, as if endurance is all we can achieve.
The poor aren't defeated. We're domesticated.
Nearly everyone could be undone by an old woman's displeasure.
Doubt is the big machine. It grinds up the delusions of women and men.
William Kowalski is the kind of storyteller you don’t see quite enough these days. The yarn spinner with a generous soul. The Hundred Hearts is a moving, humane adventure about the price of personal connections and the costs of sacrifice. I tore through this bad boy in two short nights.
Jesmyn Ward is an alchemist. She transmutes pain and loss into gold. Men We Reaped illustrates hardships but thankfully, vitally, it's just as clear about the humor, the intelligence, the tenderness, the brilliance of the folks in DeLisle, Mississippi. A community that's usually wiped off the literary map can't be erased when it's in a book this good.