Wells Tower lives in North Carolina and Brooklyn. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, GQ, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s and elsewhere. The recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and the Plimpton Discovery Prize, Tower’s new collection is Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (Granta), from which this story is taken. “Door in your eye” is, he told Prospect, “more or less a compendium of curiosities accumulated during two years I spent living in New Orleans. In an earlier draft, the narrator was a proxy for myself, which on later reads seemed dull and anthropological. I much prefer the older gentleman. I think he gives the piece a larger heart.”
