#jon raymond

[kamreadsandrecs]

Miracles, Magic Thinking, and the Climate Crisis | Los Angeles Review of Books

Tess Pollok interviews Jon Raymond about his new novel, “God and Sex.”​​

[kammartinez]

Miracles, Magic Thinking, and the Climate Crisis | Los Angeles Review of Books

Tess Pollok interviews Jon Raymond about his new novel, “God and Sex.”​​

[dk-thrive]

I’d already given up on that idea. But isn’t that the way it always goes? The moment you give up on something, that’s when it springs to life.

— Jon Raymond, God and Sex: A Novel (Simon & Schuster, August 5, 2025)

[dk-thrive]

You keep peeling back, you keep whittling.

I’ve tried starting with dialogue, with the weather, and with quotations, but everything was too tight, or too ponderous, or too forced. All those beginnings felt like they were coming from up in my throat, not down in my body, where the better writing is born. Maybe in another writer’s hands they could have become something, but for me, they all felt like carving into petrified wood. Most writers would have given up by now, but I’ve kept on seeking. As a writer, I think that’s what you do. You keep peeling back, you keep whittling. Eventually, maybe, you find the right phrasing. And then you move on to the next sentence and do it again. The next sentence often changes something in the sentence before, and you have to go back and start all over. Problem after problem, you try to solve it. What is writing but the solving of impossible problems? Or like Suzuki said: Nirvana is to see a thing through to the end.

— Jon Raymond, God and Sex: A Novel (Simon & Schuster, August 5, 2025)

[dk-thrive]

A good thing about a book is the way it fills up your time. It’s always there, ready to distract you from enormous tracts of your life. You can always burrow down into the clauses of your language world and put the other, real world out of sight. It can be sad, really, how selfish it makes a person. I’d once liked to believe I’d become a writer because it connected me to other people, but sometimes, I had to admit, the opposite was true. Writing allowed me to isolate.

— Jon Raymond, God and Sex: A Novel (Simon & Schuster, August 5, 2025)

[allthatiknowisthatiknownothing]

“The only immutable law of the universe (is) irony.” - John Raymond, God and Sex

[dk-thrive]

And the part about light as a living creature,” he said. “What a beautiful thought. I hadn’t really heard that idea before...It really got me for a second,” he said. “I had to think about it. Is light alive? I mean, it doesn’t excrete anything. It doesn’t reproduce. And yet it gives life, so it must have some kind of life to give..." He’d isolated the ultimate kernel...the very idea that I’d fallen in love with, the idea of light as a kind of amniotic fluid flooding the cosmos.

— Jon Raymond, God and Sex: A Novel (Simon & Schuster, August 5, 2025)

[dk-thrive]

A book is round.

A book is round. To a reader, it unscrolls in a single line, left to right, snaking down the page, wrapping onto the next, but to a writer, it turns more like a wheel. It rolls out of darkness and catches you up, trapping you inside its circle for a year or ten years, however long it takes. You move around inside it, back and forth, until finally it releases you, although it never really does, not entirely. You could say a book eats a writer many times. You could say it eats itself. In any case, to a writer, the idea of a beginning or an ending is absurd.

— Jon Raymond, God and Sex: A Novel (Simon & Schuster, August 5, 2025)