I talked with my talented, generous, and smart friend and fellow fiction writer, classmate, colleague, and Midwesterner writer in exile, Bryan Hurt about a ton of shit: Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments, grad school, living and studying in LA, workshop at USC, exploring the counterfactual reality of Los Angeles, nostalgia, mixed-race identity in the Midwest, writing from the outside, the role and mission of experimental writing, and the value of pyrotechnical syntax on the page, among other things, for the Los Angeles Review of Books. If you have a second, please read this interview, which will definitely be one of the most interesting ones you’ll read this month. I promise.