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
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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.
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'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.
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Here's the thing: I was charming. Well read and well spoken. Observant and even kind. In other words, I was kind of a catch. And I knew this was true. As long as you couldn't see me. If you saw me, you'd think I was the sea cow that had swallowed your catch.
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I hadn't stopped fearing the chance of passing on an illness, but that fear had become balanced by the observation that being ill wasn't the same as being beaten.
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I have a very intimate knowledge of the world of the mentally ill and of life inside of, especially, public hospitals and the way people are treated in there and the way that they try to survive in there.
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I like America, where believers eddy around each other like currents of air. Even our atheists are devout! To be an American is to be a believer. I don't have much faith in institutions, but I still believe in people.
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I was dressed like Darth Vader. Vader was my man, even with the villainy. He wore all black and had a deep voice; he reminded me of my uncle. I had a cheap mask-cape combo, the kind available at any pharmacy during October.
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In the past, a writer had to go outside and get to know others before learning about their work, but the Internet has made humanity more accessible for misanthropes like me. I read blogs, tweets, Facebook posts and Reddit threads where people detail their jobs.
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Miniature golf, like billiards, is a game of angles. And, like billiards, most of the fun is in pretending you know what the hell you're doing. The worse you do, the more you have to laugh.
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On June 23, 1864, Ambrose Bierce was in command of a skirmish line of Union soldiers at Kennesaw Mountain in northern Georgia. He'd been a soldier for three years and, in that time, had been commended by his superiors for his efficiency and bravery during battle.
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One of the most widely read novels by a black American is Ralph Ellison's 'Invisible Man.' It is his masterwork - it won the National Book Award in 1953 and catapulted my man to the highest levels of literary esteem.
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Social media give me the privilege of learning about more people than I could meet in my whole life. Taken together, the Internet reads like the grandest character-driven novel humanity has ever known. Not much plot, though.
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The journalistic endeavor - at least theoretically - is grounded in objectivity. The goal is to get you to understand what happened, when and to whom.
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The project of Ralph Ellison's 'Invisible Man' is exactly that: to assert the beautiful, bountiful, chaotic complexity of one black American male. And, by extension, all black American males.