‘Sunbather’, my first book, is now on Amazon in paperback, hardcover, and on Kindle. It’s a short story collection that kind of feels like a novel. Designed to be a fun and wild read, two decades in the making.
@NBCNews It’s so telling that she would kill her children and wish for a light sentence. The fact that this even went to trial (and she didn’t immediately beg for the worst imaginable punishment) is proof that she deserves the worst imaginable punishment.
Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library was the best contribution to child literacy ever made by a celebrity. Our paths crossed once, in the 90s, backstage at a talk show, and I was completely tongue-tied and starstruck. RIP Dolly. You were a complete, irreplaceable one-off.
An American asked me what I did for work.
I told him.
He said, "Yeah, but what do you do?"
I told him again, slower.
He said, "No, I mean what do you actually love doing."
I have been asked my job a thousand times in Japan. Nobody has ever asked me a second question.
I said I liked writing. I said it apologetically, the way you admit a crime.
He said, "Then you're a writer."
I told him nobody pays me.
He said, "Didn't ask that."
In my country you become a thing after permission is granted. A company. A title. A card with your name and your rank printed in the correct order.
Here a stranger at a barbecue can hand you an identity while holding a paper plate.
I said I wasn't sure I was good enough yet.
He shrugged and said, "You'll get good. Everybody's bad first."
Then he went to check the grill, because to him the matter was closed.
That was fourteen months ago.
I have written every day since.
America, you have a terrible habit. You look at a man who has done nothing yet and describe him as the thing he might become, out loud, with total confidence, in front of witnesses.
It is not accurate.
But it works.
The reason we never hear a view shared by 80 percent of the public in any newspaper is an industry-wide conspiracy to suppress those views in favor of an astroturfed pseudo-consensus