Joe Meno (born 1974) is a novelist, writer of short fiction, playwright, and music journalist based in Chicago.
And it's exactly what's wrong with the radio. It's like. . . anything that tries to appeal to everybody always ends up sounding so cheap.
I always feel super uncomfortable when it's like ah, there probably has to be a sex scene. I feel really bad and then always look around to see if anyone is watching me while I'm writing. I want to apologize to people who have to read those sex scenes, but I feel like it's part of the characters life, it's important.
Imagination is a place where all the important answers live.
[Sex] is really awkward. You know you have expectations and then it's this great moment of connection and it's a surprise. But that's what so exciting about it is that sense of surprise.
We have fun acting like this, acting like we are incredibly offended. Really, we are just bored to tears with everything.
I was getting close to thirty and was trying on the idea of becoming more mature. I was reading more. I had gone out and bought a lot of shirts.
It is the strain of walking around the world-down the street, riding city buses and elevators, moving from place to place to place-and not knowing who might want to destroy you, who might like to fill your heart with poison, who might rob you and stab you, who might stand above you in the dark with a tarantula.
What I've learned is that there is nothing in this life that does not fail to disappoint us, even our own deaths.
The longer human beings exist, it seems, the less likely we are to choose to be brave.
A book is actually a place, a place where we, as adults, still have the chance to engage in active imagining, translating word to image, connecting these images to memories, dreams, and larger ideas. Television, film, even the stage play, have already been imagined for us, but the book, in whatever form we choose to interact with it, forces us to complete it.
Maybe that's why people have friends at all. Not because they like them so much but because they don't make them feel so much worse.
Our worlds are so momentary. We are along all our lives and then go off that way as well.
Where do you go when you die? Ha ha. Go on, go on and tell her, Billy. " Billy smiles. "You become a little voice in someone's ear telling them that things will be alright.
Sex scenes in books are always like first person, from this male perspective and just about how awesome he is. It feels like such a fantasy.
After school the very next day, El Rey's mobile home was gone. I laid in bed and wondered what happens to people when they go, if they become like shadows, if they fade away when they disappear from your life. The only thing I could see was the broken picket fence. The only sound I could hear was the cry of birds being killed in the night.
Potluck Supper with Meeting to Follow is a marvel, deftly examining the connections between art and everyday life. Andy Sturdevant's lively, unique inquiries into trust fund kids, co-opted flags, gubernatorial portraits, art in second-tier cities, and Upper Midwestern esoterica, brim with both wit and humor.
Beneath all of her thoughts and worries, beneath the complication of conflicting identities and needs, maybe it's as simple as loving the way some other person looks when they're sleeping.
An act of evil is the death of wonder
In novels you're able to occupy character's internal thoughts and it's really hard to do in a film or a TV show. When you're reading a character's thoughts or when it's in first person, you're reading kind of their own story, so you have the opportunity to see what makes that character complex or complicated. And to me that's what the whole point of fiction is.
The more I write, the more I've come to realize that books have a different place in our society than other media. Books are different from television or film because they ask you to finish the project. You have to be actively engaged to read a book. It's more like a blueprint. What it really is, is an opportunity. . . A book is a place where you're forced to use your imagination. I find it disappointing that you're not being asked to imagine more.