Michelle Dean

“Summer is always a tricky time to recommend new literary fiction. The big releases do not hit until fall.”

“Telling a story about someone has enormous power. People forget a headline. They remember a story.”

“Novelists do not swing on the same pendulums as critics.”

“Peak TV has resulted in beautiful shows that have nothing in particular to tell us about humanity.”

“There's no good way to be the center of a media maelstrom you did not choose for yourself.”

“Great novels are maps of complication, leading nowhere in particular, taking stances only provisionally and obliquely, happy to be tangled and to lack as many answers as the people they seek to depict.”

“There is nothing wrong with wanting to publish - or read - books that have a wide potential audience. But it does generate a certain plodding sameness of tone and subject matter that plagues a lot of contemporary American fiction.”

“When Paul Beatty's 'The Sellout' was first published in America in 2015, it was a small release. It got a rave review in the daily 'New York Times' and one in the weekly 'New York Times Book Review,' too, for good measure. But by and large, it was not a conversation-generating book.”

“A certain kind of person in America loves to note that they're currently soldiering through the latest Pulitzer winner for history, in particular. It connotes a certain gravitas, a connectedness to the literary and intellectual scene that most upwardly mobile professionals in America still desire.”

“I tend to judge a piece of criticism by how smart I find the argument. This, I know,, is not how everyone does it.”

“I still think, most of the time, when people called shows like 'The Sopranos' or 'Deadwood' 'art' that they were correct.”

“If you care about a subject, there's a podcast for it.”

“Podcast listening carries with it a faint aura of cultural snobbery, a notion that to cue up an episode is to do something highbrow and personally enriching, whether it's a history lecture broadcast from a university or an amateur talk show recorded in someone's garage.”

“I read almost no romantic fiction, in part because I barely believe in romance in the age of Tinder.”

“Hollywood versions of watershed moments in American history are generally high-minded shlock. 'JFK,' 'The People vs. Larry Flynt,' even 'Lincoln': all of these boast excellent performances in scripts that are ultimately very conventional, even conservative.”

“Dan Brown and the 'Da Vinci Code' have been around well over a decade now, and to be perfectly honest, both he and it have become a joke.”

“A presidential candidate changing churches is hardly unusual. Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, and Rand Paul have all aligned themselves with different faiths throughout their lives.”

“After living in the United States for over 10 years, here is what I have learned about the Fourth of July: it is more of a barbecuing holiday than anything else.”

“Vacation reading is not a new concept. Ever since the 19th century, when novels were considered relatively sinful indulgences, leisure and fiction-reading have been closely associated.”

“Perhaps crisis forces commonality of purpose on one another.”