STACEY D'ERASMO

Fiction, at its best, is a radical act of intimacy. It seeks to join, to merge, to know deeply; and, as with intimacy, there is a way in which it cannot be faked.

Shelley Jackson's 'Half Life' is the textual equivalent of an installation, a multivocal, polymorphous, dialogic, dystopian satire wrapped around a murder mystery wrapped around a bildungsroman.

You can conclude from the glossy surfaces of 'The L Word' that L stands for latte or Lexus and stop there. Or you can notice that in some of its less flashy moments, the show has staked a claim on Large - as in a larger, denser, more ambivalent imaginary world, populated by imperfect and riveting citizens of all sexual stripes.

In her previous novels, Maggie O'Farrell has often measured the distance between intimates and the unexpected intimacy of distance - geographic, temporal, cultural. In 'The Hand That First Held Mine' and 'The Distance Between Us,' characters separated by many miles or many years turn out to be joined in ways they never anticipated.

'The Girls' tells the story of Rose and Ruby Darlen, who are not only literally but spiritually attached for eternity. Born joined at the head in 1974 to a feckless teenage mother who abandons them, and reared by a delightfully open-minded adoptive couple, the Darlen girls are darling girls, indeed.

My books - I kid you not - are very often shelved between DeLillo and de Sade. Which not only completely cracks me up, but it seems like an encouraging message from the universe: between those two, there's a lot of wiggle room. I feel just fine there.

I write things in my house, and hopefully there's a reader out there who enjoys it and has an experience with it, but that's very different than a performer on stage, where there's an immediate dance with the audience. It's incredibly powerful.

I'm not a parent, but it seems to me the nature of parenting is contingent, full of unexpected challenges - which is one of the wonderful and amazing things about it.

As for me, I've been in love with women and men. I get how people fall in love with different kinds of people, but to fall in love with God: I didn't get that.

For the Supreme Court, the right for everyone to say 'I do' is where the story ends, but for artists, it's where the story just starts to get interesting.

Emotional grandeur, rendered in the vernacular, has been Mona Simpson's forte. In her novels, 'Anywhere but Here,' 'The Lost Father' and 'A Regular Guy,' Simpson wrote wide and long and high about the most profound human bonds: parents and children lost each other, found each other, lost each other again, but differently.

Writers and musicians are very similar in that the chances of making a life in either field are so infinitesimal. And once you're in, the chances of staying viable are difficult. But there is something incredibly different about performing in front of a live audience, as opposed to sitting at your desk typing.

In 'The L Word' heterosexuals playfully remark to one another on which members of the same sex they find hot and sometimes dally accordingly; lesbians pick up men if they want to; one of the women is bisexual; and, as in life, gay people and straight people go to the same parties, live in the same neighborhoods and are even related to one another.

In 1976, divorce could still raise eyebrows, as could a woman's decision not to have children. Dyslexia wasn't as commonly recognized then, and thus not treated as it is today.

As readers, we sense when the game is being played for real and when something else is afoot: pride, showmanship, the pursuit of power, self-aggrandizement, revenge, making money. Not that there's anything wrong with any of that, but I dislike closing a book with the sense that I've been had.

The knot of intimacy at the center of 'Ten Thousand Saints' is the friendship between Teddy McNicholas and Jude Keffy-Horn.

One of the first times that I went into a book store and saw a bunch of my books, my impulse was to put them all under my coat and run away so that no one else could see them, even though, of course, I wanted everyone to see them.

That feeling of being part of a group moving together is very powerful. It feels like it opens up a zone of possibility, a place for another self to form, also a place for a new world to form.

I'm a huge fan of San Francisco. And I was out here for a couple years in the mid-'90s when I was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford.

The spirits of Havelock Ellis, Magnus Hirschfeld and Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebbing waft through the text to lend 'The Third Sex' an air of scientific authority.

If we are indeed nostalgic for the weight of clock time, it is worth remembering that the standardized time that most of us know has only been around since the mid-nineteenth century. It was invented for the railroads.

A bit of a theory, more a corner of the eye noticing than an airtight argument: in the course of long artistic careers, women are more likely than men to change form and style, Proteus-like.

Of course, a secret is no good if it doesn't need to be a secret.

There are more clocks than ever - clocks on computers, on cell phones, on televisions, on any screen available, telling time to the digital second - but they all seem to matter less.

'The Girls,' by Lori Lansens, is a ballad, a melancholy song of two very strange, enchanted girls who live out their peculiar, ordinary lives in a rural corner of Canada.