As a culture, we often fetishize the debut writer as some sort of self-arising wunderkind, someone that comes “out of nowhere” or had “splashed onto the scene” unannounced, seemingly without a pre-history or predecessors. This is compounded for writers of color, who seem, according to this narrative, to arrive at the literary table by “transcending” … Continue reading Ocean Vuong: The 10 Books I Needed to Write My Novel