I’m not sure I’ve ever felt so much gratitude, all at once, for the kindness and generosity of the people in my life. The support I’ve received around the publication of this book is truly humbling—it’s almost overwhelming. I hope to spread this feeling.

The interview with the psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips in the latest Paris Review (208) has been a gift this week, so much brilliance in so few pages:

The Leavisite position, more or less, is that reading certain sentences makes you more alive and a morally better person, and that those two things go together. It seems to me that that isn’t necessarily so, but what is clear is that there are powerful unconscious evocative effects in reading books that one loves. There’s something about these books that we want to go on thinking about, that matters to us. They’re not just fetishes that we use to fill gaps. They are like recurring dreams we can’t help thinking about.

—A. Phillips.

8th Ave