Jane Recommends “Imposter” via CATAPULT

An excerpt from “Imposter” by Alexander Chee:

I had sublet often in this life, but this time was different. In previous sublets, I’d been around other people’s things, but here I was with my own, and I found I liked my things in this apartment in some way I hadn’t before. I hadn’t been much for possessions, never had spent more than a few dollars on any particular piece of furniture because what was the point of having things if you couldn’t write? You would only sell them in order to write, as I’d learned early on in New York, standing in line at the Strand to sell a few used books just to get lunch. The books on my shelf after all this time have withstood at least a thousand moments when I scanned them, deciding which ones I could or could not turn into money in order to eat if this or that check failed to come through. A library of survivors.

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Jane says: I think I’d be darling at being “writer rich” and sitting in the dazzling light of a crystal chandelier:

I think writers are often terrifying to normal people, i.e. non writers in a capitalist system, for this reason: there is almost nothing they will not sell in order to have this time. Time is our mink, our Lexus, our mansion. In a room full of writers of various kinds, time is probably the only thing that can provoke widespread envy more than acclaim. Acclaim which of course means access to money, which then becomes time.