Reading a Kevin Moffett story strongly resembles Kevin Moffett’s description of reading a story. This is so much the case that the titular opening story from his latest collection, Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events, almost serves as an aesthetic statement, an ars poetica, or ars fictiona. The narrator, Frederick Moxley, discovers his father has been writing and publishing stories under their shared name, stories which call into question Fred Jr.’s memories about their family and his deceased mother. Peppered throughout are aesthetic statements regarding fiction. The narrator’s former writing instructor, Hodgett, who is fond of citing rules and grandiose mantras while fondling himself behind his desk, says his stories are all real life, that anything worth saying can’t be said, which is why we write fiction. Fred Sr. says stories are dreams. Fred Jr., upset by the fact that his hobbyist father, who never studied creative writing, appears to be outwriting him, disagrees for the sake of disagreement and says they’re jars of bees. The rest of the collection consists of third person stories that somehow satisfy all these aesthetic statements at once. They feel uncannily dreamlike while remaining rooted in real life.

“Imagine a time for your characters, Hodgett used to say, when things might have turned out differently. Find the moment a choice was made that made other choices impossible. Readers like to see characters making choices.”

The eight remaining stories revolve around the issue of choice: making choices, having them made for you, or dealing with the fallout. In “Border to Border,” for instance, Maxim, a worker in the Estonian corner of the capitalist-theme-park Small World, debates between taking out an expensive loan to replace the crown he’s swallowed, or waiting for it to come out the other end, wash it off, and have it put back in. The story’s setting and humor make it clear why George Saunders chose Moffett’s first collection, Permanent Visitors, as the winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Award. At its core lies the simple choice of how Maxim will navigate his bizarro life and workplace. Other stories explore the time after an irreversible choice. In “First Marriage,” Tad and Amy have just been married by a judge in Lake Havasu City, Arizona (“Home of the London Bridge” according to the billboards: it seems the couple have just come from a setting much like Small World), and blaze eastward toward Florida in a borrowed car, feeling out the results of their impulsive decision. “English Made Easy,” on the other hand, concerns a lack of choice: Lena’s husband has passed away and she’s forced to cope.

“Why did this simple static image seem like such a rare coin?”

Moffett has a knack for teasing out the uncanny and letting it speak for itself. He constantly presents unsettling situations and images, uncalled-for and inappropriate feelings, conversations with vaguely menacing minor characters, miscommunications and misunderstandings—all of which foster a sense of unease. Lena spends a good portion of “English Made Easy” walking alone around her neighborhood. The strangeness of life without her husband pains her. The houses seem to take on their own lives; they “float together and separate like boats in a bay.” Lena hears “the hollow, bone-like tock of bamboo chimes nearby […] a mournful, an awful sound to broadcast through the neighborhood.” Lena lies to the other characters she meets without completely understanding why.

She encounters, repeatedly, an older woman named Mrs. Appleman who suffers from an “exquisitely benign dementia.” Sometimes she remembers Lena, sometimes she doesn’t, and either way it’s eerie, as though Lena beholds the future of her own fading mind. Mrs. Appleman offers totemic statements that don’t feel entirely welcome or accurate but are also spot-on in some obscure way, such as when she calls Lena’s son a “warm little fortune cookie” or says Lena looks like she “just found a lost race.” Later in the story, when Lena runs across some bikes and thinks “if bikes were horses,” she “leaves the thought incomplete, lets it grow untended, like a deep-woods weed.” This is one of Moffett’s biggest gifts: leaving a thought or image in its fragmented and suggestive state; trusting that it will grow untended in our minds.

At the end of “Further Interpretations,” after much stalling, Fred Jr. finds himself home for the holidays. Fred Sr., who can shake presents and divine their contents, shakes one in front of his son. Listen closer, he says. This is the warm-hearted center of Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events, the aesthetic that really distinguishes this collection. There are plenty of writers who attempt to work in George Saunders’s style, one of absurdity and satire and capital letters, but what they often miss is the morality and heart at its core. Moffett misses nothing. He follows his own advice and listens closely, to the detail, to the mystery, and to his characters’ plights. You’d be wise to do the same.

[Leader quotes from Moffett's story, "Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events"]

Further Links & Resources

• Browse inside the title story on the HarperPerennial.
• Buy a copy of Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events on Amazon, IndieBound or Powell’s.
• Read an interview with Kevin Moffatt conducted by the University of Pittsburgh.

Fresh from a relationship with a feminist scholar, I was on guard against Shann Ray’s American Masculine before I even cracked its spine. With a title like that, I thought, you’d better have a gay man in Chelsea, a drag queen in Flint, a straight man watching a hired man wash his yacht, a man living out of the back of a Volvo in a Wal-Mart parking lot, a Hispanic man washing dishes, a Hispanic man climbing the corporate ladder; you’d better provide one heckova Whitmanian catalog of Masculinity in the U.S. of A. My suspicions only deepened as I read the first few stories. In them men were rough, troubled, distant, and heteronormative. Women were the epitome of light, everything good that men reached toward.

But then a curious thing happened: the beating heart of these stories won. I took a breath and relaxed into Ray’s paternal, semi-omniscient arms.

Because it’s not fair to judge a collection by its title. Mary Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior didn’t start out so winkingly alliterative and evaluative. Her publisher suggested that name.

And it’s not fair to judge a collection based on what the author didn’t intend. (See John Updike’s 6 Rules for Reviewing, dear curmudgeon.)

What Ray appears to want to do—and what Ray does—is give us wise, caring, broadly-scoped stories that roam time as freely as they range across the Western landscape in which they’re set, deeply spiritual stories with room for grand characterization—“the malice inside him like the outline of an animal in the dark,” sweeping views—“everything but the land was solitary and small under a wide, wide sky,” and muscular descriptions—“down to the tracks, the wheels, the black pump of the smoking engine, the yell of the machine.” Ray drives into rough terrain with honesty, and delivers intense portraits of what it means to try to be a man in the country, the city, an insurance office, a rodeo.

I love these stories more each time I read them.

In his recent interview with the author, Contributing Editor Steven Wingate speaks with McBrearty about such things as mythologies of the American West, the bravery of small presses, Colonel William B. Travis, and why he feels solidarity with scrappy underlings. When asked about writing novels versus short stories, McBrearty had this to say:

I’ve never gotten any of my novels completely right. They had some good writing in them—maybe some of my best—and in fact I’ve raided sections over the years and used them in short stories, but I think there’s always been some flaw, perhaps structural, perhaps a need to explore more deeply when I felt like cutting away. The short story provides a fairly clear path, once the idea sets in, so it’s easier to get from start to finish without making too many wrong turns, and if one does make a wrong turn it’s easier to get back on track.

I do have a few other thoughts about it. Raymond Carver was asked once why he wrote the short story and not the novel and he said something along the lines of he wouldn’t mind writing a novel but the short story had fit in more with the rest of his life. I feel like that a bit. I know my own level of hardship was substantially less than Carver’s, but my early years always felt kind of chaotic: bad jobs, moving around, and it was hard to sustain larger works. And then the kids came along and there was a lot of distraction there, so somehow the short story always seemed more doable. Now I’m older and the kids are grown and time seems to be opening up more, so who knows?

• To read the rest of this interview, click here.
• Read excerpts from Episode and other works over on McBrearty’s website.
• You can also win one of three, signed copies of this book, which we’ll be giving away next week to three of our Twitter followers.
• To be eligible for this giveaway (and all future ones), simply click over to Twitter and “follow” us (@fictionwriters).

To all of you who are already fans, thank you!

The first sensation when reading the Damion Searls translation of Nescio is distance—of form, not content. Even though the stories are told with perfect simplicity and lucidity, one’s reading is troubled by a difficulty in comprehending their structure, in catching hold of some central action or event being portrayed, or who the main character might be. The first four stories in the collection describe the same group of characters, a circle of would-be bohemians, and we watch them in each story struggle for money, labour at art, suffer through penniless winters, while around them bourgeois society goes on bustling and preening, never becoming aware of this powerless rebellion in its midst.

The friends always fail. They are only (as the title of one story suggests) “Little Titans,” and they will either surrender to society or die. The narrator seems himself confused by these tales, as no solution is found, yet he knows that the experiences themselves were meaningful, even if youth did not last. The stories wail again and again against the failure of the rebellion they describe, until, in Nescio’s last story, “Isola Dei,” written during the Nazi occupation, the loss of the narrator’s youth is mirrored by the loss of the country itself, and the self he laments is only a miniature of the world that economic progress and war have destroyed.

Yet these stories are also very funny. His story “The Freeloader” describes the narrator’s memories of Japi, a vagabond and scrounger, a man who continuously attempts to avoid all effort. “I am nothing and I do nothing,” Japi explains, and he disrupts these bohemians’ lives by revealing just how much stress and responsibility they have accepted. Japi has a Whitman-esque pleasure in observing the multiplicities of the world, without Whitman’s desire to subsume these into himself. Japi simply observes, and enjoys.

He knew everything along the railroad line from Middleburg to Amsterdam: every field, every ditch, every house, every road, every stand of trees, every patch of heather in Brabant, every switch in the tracks… And he’d nod and laugh whenever he saw something he knew especially well. Or else he would say, “Look, the tree is gone,” or “Hey, there are new apples on it now, I didn’t see any last time.”

Japi’s inability to understand normal people’s demands reminded me of the brightly innocent Sylvie, in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping: Japi remains jovial as the people around him grow enraged. Japi explains his failure to keep an office job by saying:

I was always late, I really tried to get there on time but it never happened, it had been going on too long. And so boring. They said I did everything wrong and I’m sure they were right about that. I wanted to but I couldn’t do it, I’m not the kind of person who is cut out for work. Then they said I was distracting the others. They were probably right about that too… I could tell a good joke, and they liked that, but it wasn’t enough for them.

Japi’s radical strangeness cannot last—he becomes serious, gets real work, and his life only worsens. Yet for a while he seems outside of the weight of the world, in contrast to the story’s narrator, Koekebakker, an aspiring writer, who is constantly short of food and warmth.

All day long it had been raining hard, almost without a break. The water ran in streams down my window-pane. It felt cozy inside. I liked it. I had no stove and my summer coat was still at the pawnshop. I had never owned a winter coat. The frost was a problem: you had to stay in bed out of poverty, it was the only way to stay warm.

Koekebakker admires something in Japi, some greater resilience, just as he admires the talent of his painter friend Bavink, who is able to sell his work, to keep painting—although we eventually learn that neither man’s defence against the world holds for long. For there is a further darkness to these tales. Although the friends disdain middle-class respectability, it is not their deepest enemy. On the edges of society, they confront the inevitable passing of time, and the vast size of the universe that seems to rob any one existence of meaning. What does a moment of wonder matter when time is always rushing on, and human beings are merely blips in the vast silence of non-existence? The narrator grows more and more aware that the death of desire in one person is not simply one man or woman’s loss, but a sign and portent of the doom we all carry. We all struggle in a universe that does not recognise the validity of desire, and we do not belong here, because our desires are constantly seeking a fulfilment they can never have. What sense can we make of this universe of death?

I thought about when these two gentlemen would die, and stand naked at the Last Judgement, and be forgotten down here. And about terribly important gentlemen coming and taking their place… And how many idealistic young people down here would have written essays by then, and written little poems and painted little pictures, and gotten angry and gotten excited about things. And kissed. And then grown important too, perhaps, and been forgotten as well.

And in this sense, the stance of these “little titans” is not just against modern capitalism, but also against time. If time will grind us all to dust, one protest is to refuse to compromise on desire, to love and adore all that one can. And among those adorations, these characters’ one true beloved is nature. They trek around the Dutch countryside, letting beauty work on them, hoping to catch it unawares.

I looked out to the east along the dike, at the couple of scrawny, windswept trees at the water’s edge, at the water, and the sky turning darker. And then Hoyer, sitting across from me, said, “Look at that sky.”

To the southwest the whole sky was yellow. And I turned to sit sideways on my chair and look, and I saw that it was good, everything was good as it was and there was nothing left to conquer, and I was alive.

This passage comes from my favourite story in the collection, “Out Along the IJ,” a very short tale of a trip along a river that leads two of the friends to rent a tiny cottage there, staying until their money (and credit) runs out. They become strange holy figures to the narrator, every day painting and observing, and there is a wonderful scene where an old flame comes to visit Bavink: annoyed by his slovenly ways, she takes off her dress to wash the stack of dirty dishes, and as she scrubs the crockery clean, the village’s schoolchildren crowd at the cottage’s window to watch, pressing “their little farm noses against the window so that all you could see were little white triangles all over and they wouldn’t leave.”

The beauty of nature, and its survival in memory, along with art’s fitful attempts to preserve and communicate it, are the only tools that Nescio’s characters have to fight off the rule of death. If there are other methods, he does not know what they are, and his characters all grow old and sad. Yet his narrator clings to his memories, and in them finds more than just consolation: he finds moments of vision, where a different universe is found. In Nescio’s last story, “Isola Dei,” while cycling alone to Eindhoven, the narrator experiences the rising beauty of the natural world, and announces with total confidence,

The day has become mine once more and mine the enchanted world. The sun stands still, there will be no night.

Further Links and Resources

• Surprisingly for a man who lived in a pre-digital age, Nescio has his own Facebook page.
• Put your Dutch to use (or the limits of online translators) with this comprehensive site dedicated to Nescio: nescio.info
• Interested in further expanding your knowledge of Holland’s writers? Visit The Foundation for the Foundation and Production of Dutch Literature online.

Congrats! To claim your free copy, please email us at the following address:

winners [at] fictionwritersreview.com

If you’d like to be eligible for future giveaways, please visit our Twitter Page and “follow” us!

Thanks to all of you who are fans. We appreciate your support. Let us know your favorite new books out there!

Jim Shepard, Credit: Michael Lionstar

A secret affair on board a zeppelin. Three brothers involved in the Chernobyl incident. A Nazi expedition in search of the Yeti. It’s a rule: any discussion of Jim Shepard’s work must eventually turn toward the range of ground covered. In hyper-condensed story after hyper-condensed story, he pushes through new subject matter that could easily have taken a whole novel to explore, and when you’ve read enough of his stories, you start to wonder if there are boundaries to his empathy. They must be somewhere, because we’ve all got them, but they certainly don’t seem to involve gender, class, nationality, sexual orientation, time, or space. Maybe it’s the human-animal divide? No, he wrote from the point of view of the swamp monster. Maybe it’s the fourth dimension? I can’t remember anything about string theory in his oeuvre. But, then, he’s still going.

Those familiar with Shepard’s past work will recognize this trend in his latest collection, You Think That’s Bad (Knopf, 2011), which could almost be read as an exercise in oneupsmanship—he invokes the voice of a “Black World” ops man embroiled in a touchy conversation with his wife and friend, an engineer made helpless in the face of a crumbling marriage and the rising sea level in the Netherlands, and even a servant of Gilles de Rais, the Breton knight and fellow of Joan of Arc accused of the serial killing of children. His narrators are thrown up against even more dire circumstances than previouisly, and while Shepard continues to take the careful time to feel for their predicaments, he also continues to spare them no sorrow (in a good kind of way).

Like a lot of my fellow MFA students and friends, I came across Jim Shepard’s work only a few years ago. I’d stumbled across a copy of Love and Hydrogen (Vintage, 2004) in the Staff Recommends section at McNally Jackson booksellers in Soho, and was immediately grabbed by the title story regarding two gay men aboard a zeppelin. But Shepard has been at this long before those National Book Award Finalist and Story Prize winner stickers were slapped on the cover of Like You’d Understand Anyway (Knopf, 2008). He’s the author of six novels and four story collections, and the editor of several anthologies. His fiction has appeared in Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Esquire, Playboy, The New Yorker, and everywhere else, and he was a columnist on film for The Believer. His stories have appeared four times in the Best American Short Stories and once in the Pushcart series. Additionally, he teaches at the Warren Wilson MFA program at Williams College and is a husband, a father, and the caretaker of two beagles.

Despite all that he was kind enough to take time to talk with me, a fan-boy and MFA candidate. Via e-mail and phone we got a chance to discuss his early career, his process, where he might take his narrators next, and how he feels his mustache measures up to Tobias Woolf’s.

Interview

Shawn Andrew Mitchell: In your essay, “An Appreciation of John Hawkes,” up over at The Rumpus, you discussed your mentorship under Hawkes during your time as an MFA candidate at Brown University. Had you done much writing before this? If it existed, what was Jim Shepard juvenilia like?

Jim Shepard: By that point I’d written my whole life, as short as it was. I’d always written, for myself, and occasionally for the nuns at Our Lady of Peace School, when I’d finished all of my English in-class assignments early. I wrote mostly about war and monsters. I remember Sister Justine being bemused at one story of mine entitled “Save That Blood!” I think it involved G.I.’s fighting werewolves. As you can see, I haven’t come very far in terms of subjects.

What sort of things did you read at that time?

Nobody in my family went to college, so I only read what books my parents had in the house, which were almost entirely nonfiction. What that meant was that because nobody had taught them about literature or encouraged them to read literature, they thought “Well, of course you want to read because you want to be an intelligent human being, but if you’re going to read you want to learn stuff, and the way you learn stuff is you read nonfiction.” So I grew up reading all about volcanoes and dinosaurs in little science or history books for kids. Every so often I read a sort of summarized version of Viking myths or Greek Myths. I didn’t really know about the world of children’s books until I got to college and people would say “I love Where the Wild Things Are,” and I would say “What’s that?”

Do you still go back and read about mythology?

Not really, no. I’ve read Italian Folktales by Italo Calvino and stuff like that, but I don’t do that kind of folkloric wandering very often. I wouldn’t pick it up as a kind of curiosity. Normally there are so many other things I’ve got to get to that I don’t think, “You know, I don’t know any South Seas myths, I think I’ll read some of those.”

If the internet is to be trusted, you graduated from Brown in 1980 and your first book, the novel Flights, came out in 1983. What were you up to during those three years, creatively and professionally? I ask partially because I’m about to exit my MFA program, and there seems to be a yawning void ahead.

I got a job right out of Brown, at the last minute, teaching at the University of Michigan. I was finishing the final year of my MFA and facing the void you describe when Michigan asked Brown for the names of two or three students they might invite to apply to teach. I agreed to the interview because it meant a free trip to New York; I never really imagined they’d offer me the job. Then when Michigan did, I accepted, since I had no other prospects. The hubris of what I was doing never really hit me until I arrived in Ann Arbor. I spent the next three years working eighteen hours a day to keep up with what I had agreed to teach. (As in, “Hey: I’m lecturing on Lolita on Thursday. Oh, shit.”) During the summers, I tried to prepare for the upcoming fall semesters, and worked on Flights.

Flights was followed by three more novels: Paper Doll [1987], Lights out in the Reptile House [1990], and Kiss of the Wolf [1994]. Then, in 1996, Knopf published your first collection, Batting Against Castro. Were you working on short stories concurrently with the novels, or did you break from those entirely until you began work on Batting?

I wrote stories as an undergraduate and a graduate student, so a number of stories that are in Batting Against Castro are quite old. Some of them are older than my first novel. There’s a story in there called “Eustace,” which was the first story I published. There’s also a story called “Messiah,” which was probably the first decent story I wrote after a whole lot of bad stories. So Batting Against Castro, unlike a lot of the other story collections, really took about fifteen or twenty years to come together. It’s probably my weakest story collection if I had to judge, mostly because I think I’ve gotten better as a story writer. But whereas You Think That’s Bad took two and a half years, Batting probably took twenty. Mostly because I was writing novels along the way.

Along with the teaching load.

Along with the teaching and having children and bothering the dog and stuff like that.

Do you find it hard to switch between working on short stories and working on a novel? I’m having to work on stories for workshop right now, but I’m focusing on a novel for my thesis. It’s a tough balancing act.

No, I think what the stories were doing was allowing me to write when I didn’t have a novel idea or when the novel idea that I had didn’t seem to be working. So I didn’t really feel like I was switching. I felt like I was saying, “Well, since you don’t have a novel, why don’t you try to do something?” Or I might have come across an idea that I thought was cool but I knew wouldn’t be a novel. So it didn’t feel much like switching. It felt like trying to keep myself working in some capacity.

What sort of ideas do you feel could shape into a novel and which ones do you know are going to be short storyish?

It’s hard to say, really. Certainly some of the longer stories I’ve written lately have had a huge amount of narrative that could have been developed and a huge amount of research that went into them. A lot of my writer friends have said, “You’re crazy for not making this a 500 page novel.” So it’s not exactly inherent in the narrative itself. It has a lot more to do with how long I want to maintain the obsessive intensity of staring into that world. I think as I’ve gotten darker in terms of subject matter, the desire to stay in that world has diminished as well. If you’re writing about the servant of a mass murderer, the energy involved in trying to stay empathetic is such that five months is probably enough and three years might be too much.

Why do you think your subject matter has gotten darker as you’ve gone along?

I don’t know, but I think in general my sense of the world is becoming more apocalyptic. The despairing or angry sense you have that things are going down the toilet, which I suppose is a characteristic of getting old and crotchety, is a little bit exaggerated by a situation whereby you can almost confirm that sense just by empirical standards or even just by watching the news. It was always the case when I was growing up that people would say “America’s not what it used to be; the world’s going to hell.” It seemed back then that it was pretty easy to claim that was a controversial position. Now I don’t think it is. I guess I have a sense of powerlessness in the face of that. Very few people are in any position to stop it, but writing literature is a particularly good way to feel like you have no impact on the culture.

Was there a time when you felt that fiction could influence the culture in a positive way?

I recently visited Notre Dame. And some faculty there told me that on the day that Martin Luther King was shot in 1968, all of the major news services were frantically calling South Bend because apparently Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer, Ralph Ellison, Kurt Vonnegut, and Wright Morris were all there for the literary conference, and the national media urgently needed some American fiction writers’ responses to what had happened. The assumption was—as it still is in Europe—that  literary fiction writers, having engaged with some care the social issues of the day, had something to contribute to the national conversation. Try to imagine something like that today.

That’s uplifting to think about… Maybe we should switch topics to something jollier like “craft.” How about research? At what point in the process does your research begin to coalesce into fiction? Does the research continue into the drafting time, or do you get it done beforehand?

I do a lot of reading of weird shit just because I like to, and some of that never coalesces into anything.  At some point, though, sometimes various human dilemmas I’ve come across in my reading start to haunt me—resonate with some of my own emotional history—and at that point I might start researching more pointedly. Research continues all the way through the writing process, and even the final revisions.

Speaking of, McSweeney’s sent you to the Netherlands for a few weeks to do research for “The Netherlands Lives with Water,” one of the short stories included in You Think That’s Bad. How did your process differ for that story vs. stories where your research typically involves more reading than travel?

It didn’t, really. Being in the Netherlands led me to other sources of information – taught me about other sources of information – the same way books would have. Maybe I developed a more visceral sense of Rotterdam from being there for as long as I was; I don’t know.

Have you done a lot of traveling in your life otherwise?

I never traveled at all until after I got my first decent-paying job, at the aforementioned University of Michigan. Since then I’ve gone to Europe a lot, and around the US. And the Caribbean. That’s about it.

Do those trips spur an interest in writing stories set there at all? Or does that still come mostly via your off-the-wall reading?

With some stories a trip is certainly a help. It would help if you’re writing a story about an executioner in Paris if you had actually been in Paris and wandered the streets. But for the most part these are research and imagination-based stories. I’ve written about Tibet and never been to Tibet. I’ve written about Australia and never been in Australia. I’ve written about Japan and never been in Japan. I don’t feel the impulse to have to be there. There have been times when I thought I should make the trip but the cost and rigmarole were such that I thought “You’re better off writing than going through all that energy.”

Have you ever tried your hand at more straightforward nonfiction or journalism instead of stories?

I’ve done essay writing on politics and film. I haven’t been that interested in journalism because I think other people can do it as well as I can if not better, and nobody’s offering. Nobody’s saying “Jim, do you want go study this or study that?” I also don’t know if there’s that many outlets for it. If I said, “Gee, would you pay me to go on site at Fukushima and report on the reactor breakdown?”, I think most nonfiction or journalism outlets would go, “Well, you’re a fiction writer, what do we get out of that?” So then it becomes a question of if I want to do all of that on spec or put in all of that money up front and write this piece and hope somebody somewhere runs it. And I’m not sure there’s too many things, facing limitations like that, where I think, “If I don’t do it, no one will.” I also understand why, if I were a newspaper or magazine editor, I might say, “I’d rather have a physicist who can write travel to Fukushima rather than send a fiction writer to chat with physicists.”

It seems that a large majority of your stories are in first person. Has it always been that way? What draws you to that point of view more than others?

My first three novels were in the close third person, which seemed to me much more flexible. Lately, though, I’ve been attracted to the perversity of highlighting the chutzpah involved in some of my choices of narrators. Maybe it raises the stakes for me.

Related to that, it’s often struck me while reading your stories that what might be even harder than crafting a story around so much factual research is getting the human tone right for that time and place. Do you think about this while you work? How much do you change your tone and style for each story?

I think about that a lot, because that’s really what’s on the page. In a lot of ways, if I’m writing a story about Tsuburaya, the Japanese special effects wizard, it’s really more important that I get his voice right than if I get the Japanese details right, at least at first. And the two are not very separable. So I’m much more interested in trying to nail that down, especially now that I’m doing more first person stories than third person stories. Although that story is in third person, there’s still a quality where you want to provide the illusion of a very different sensibility, but a sensibility that is still apprehensible to the American reader. So that’s really a matter of very careful moderation of tone. Tone is partly based on concrete details, but also on how that voice presents information.

So a lot of energy goes into that at a very early stage. Do I have what seems to me persuasively strange in the way I want it to be strange? Do these sound like Poles even though I’ve not spent a lot of time around Polish people? Do these sound like Japanese people even though I’ve not spent a lot of time around Japanese people?

It seems like it could become a question of nature vs. nurture, as in how much is specific to a culture and how much you can just assume is a kind of cultural universal in regards to “human nature.”

Right. There’s a slight of hand there because literature is supposed to be universal, but you also believe that you’re learning very specific cultural eccentricities. So you can relate to Tsuburaya because he’s a human being too, but you also feel sometimes reading him “God, that’s so Japanese,” and you’re not even sure what you mean by that in some ways. What you mean is a combination of insight and stereotype and any number of other things.

But stereotype is just a kind of brutish way of gathering together empirical data and insights about a particular group. So you say Italians tend to be warmer than Germans or Germans tend to be more organized than Italians, and of course those are generalities and stereotypes, but the Italians and Germans would also be the first ones to tell you, “Yeah, that’s sort of true.” So you’re trying in some way to interrogate the stereotypes and explode the stereotypes even as you make use of them.

There’s a subtle difference between stereotype and archetype, maybe?

Yeah, that’s a part of it. Archetype I try to avoid because it has so much of a Jungian grandiosity to it. I think of archetype not so much as German as The King or The Son or something like that.

What is it about the chutzpah-filled and somewhat self-deceiving character that attracts you?

I like the tension that comes when somebody who is quite self-conscious and quite smart still doesn’t seem to get it about himself or herself. I like the way that highlights and muddles those issues of responsibility and agency. I think a story where someone simply doesn’t know any better and so he does something wrong is a much simpler story, because that seems to suggest that if you just gave them the right information, that would solve the problem. I don’t think a lot of human behavior that’s very interesting operates that way. I think there’s a lot of examples where the person knows what he or she should be doing, tries to do it, and fails, and that’s very interesting.

You’ve talked in other interviews about how writers need to broaden their empathetic range, aka how deeply they can feel about how broad a swath of the world’s people. Do you have any advice as to how we might go about this? What do you encourage writers to do to develop it?

The usual: read more, and read more widely. Observe more carefully. What’s that great Walker Evans line? “Die knowing something. You’re not here long.”

You’ve also lectured that the writer should provide operating instructions for the reader to be able to navigate the story. What kind of instructions?

Each story creates its own special set of expectations, I think, and I’m always grateful when a design that I thought I’d begun to discern is confirmed, gracefully, by the story itself. What we don’t need is to be told stuff we already know, or have intuited.

What sort of things do you find your students telling the reader over and over again? What do they often leave out that seems essential?

It really depends on the model they’re trying to build. But when you’re trying different things, you want to reassure the reader that the weird thing they’ve started to notice, you meant that to be there. There are all sorts of way to reassure the reader of that kind of thing, but I’ll give you an example. You might have a person wander onto stage and start saying stereotypical things about Chinese people, and the reader reading that goes, “Is that the story’s agenda?” But as soon as a secondary character says, “You realize you sound like an idiot, right?”, the reader has a great sigh of relief and says, “Oh, OK, this story knows that it’s doing that.” That’s a really simple way that operating instructions might work. You basically say, “I know you thought it sounded weird, but in fact, I know that too,” and the reader suddenly feels a lot more confident in the design as you go along.

It’s that moment in Ulysses where you go, “Oh, this isn’t a guy who doesn’t understand punctuation. This is being done for a reason and paying off, and there’s a consistency to it.”

Another element of your teaching is that the writer should control the “rate of revelation” in the story, or how fast how many things are revealed as the story progresses. For the sake of facts and numbers, what’s the ideal rate of revelation in terms of revelations per page (r.p.p.)? How much character, conflict, background, and factual data can the reader digest at a time?

Ha! How do you measure such a thing? I suppose I’d say that everything in a short story should be accomplishing multiple tasks at once, in terms of informing the reader, and that everything should be continually enlarging, as opposed to confirming, our understanding.

Going back to the weird shit you read, what have you gotten into recently?

To give you a sense of how weird my shit can get, lately I’ve been reading about 17th and 18th century farming in America. If you want to talk about a subject where people think, “Why on Earth would you do that?” That’s the kind of weird stuff that I’ll just get into and start nosing around and not even be sure why. I don’t know how long it lasts. I do know that the good news is that if I do it for awhile and think, “Alright, I’ve done enough of that,” I don’t beat myself up over it and go, “What was the point?” Because I do think it’s interesting while I’m doing it and it’s in some way enlarging my concept of the world.

Are you working on another novel now, or do you plan to continue blowing up the short story form? What are we going to see next?

I have only the most tentative plans for a novel at this point, so I’d expect more stories. Bad news for anyone who depends on me in economic terms.

You’ve been at this now for quite some time. What have you noticed in those who keep at it versus those who don’t?

Quite some time? Jeez. Now I’m depressed. If it’s not too circular in terms of reasoning, I think I’d suggest that the main thing those who’ve kept at it have going for them has not been talent but the willingness or the determination to persevere. Not only in the face of rejection from the outside world, but also in the face of their own disappointments with themselves.

Maybe we should end this on a lighter note than our deep, deep disappointment in ourselves. My friend wanted me to ask you about your mustache, specifically how you feel yours measures up to Tobias Woolf’s.

Oh, man: it’s not even close. Toby’s  mustache is epic. He could star in a western series for HBO. I look like the skeevy guy with the unmarked van.

A Western-style mustache that belongs to neither Shepard nor Wolff.

Further Links and Resources:

Congrats! To claim your free copy, please email us at the following address:

winners [at] fictionwritersreview.com

If you’d like to be eligible for future giveaways, please visit our Twitter Page and “follow” us! Thanks to all of you who are fans.

And then, the story enters its remarkable final passage:

Up ahead, a sugar-beet factory was sending a long, white plume of steam across the interstate, a solid-looking cloud of murk. [Rich] could imagine a figure emerging out of it, lurching steadily and almost gracefully, like a knight on a horse out of the fog, but there was nothing. They passed under it, and the road didn’t even grow misty. It just darkened, and they felt the shadow of the steam fly over them.

What? he thought.

What, indeed? It’s a question without an answer. “There was nothing,” we are told—and yet traditional short-story form demands, at this point in the narrative, that there be something. “Presentiment” subverts formal expectations to create a deeply unsettling reading experience.

A very similar process is at work in many of the stories in Stay Awake. At times, the echo is obvious; one story steadily builds an atmosphere of creeping unease, only to terminate at the exact moment a dark but unarticulated revelation clicks into place: “‘Oh my God,’ [he] says.” And in many other stories, the tension between what is revealed (very little, in general) and what is implied (usually much, much more) functions, as it does in “Presentiment,” to trigger the reader’s anxiety. Chaon has long been a master of the deliberately foreshortened or seductively incomplete narrative, and the stories in Stay Awake stand as fresh evidence of this.

In its content, too, Stay Awake represents a continued engagement with Chaon’s established concerns. “There was something wrong with the world itself,” muses a character in one of the stories from Chaon’s 2003 collection, Among the Missing. “He could have sworn he knew in his heart that something terrible had happened to the world, and that everyone knew it but him.” In Stay Awake, a similar creeping, paranoid certainty is everywhere, but in many cases, its direction has been reversed: now it is the main characters who are sure something terrible has happened, while everyone around them seems oblivious.

This dynamic plays out in story after story. In “To Psychic Underworld:” a man nicknamed Critter grows convinced that the bits of discarded notes and graffiti he notices around downtown Toledo are part of a larger pattern—that, in fact, “the world was trying to send him a message.” Similarly, in “I Wake Up,” a narrator who harbors a buried childhood trauma confides, “Nearly every week I would come across some little thing . . . just minor things that would startle me as if I recognized them. What is it? I would think.” To these characters, the world practically hums with hidden—and ominous—meaning. It begs to be deciphered, even as the curtain of indecipherability refuses to rise. Brandon’s assessment in the story “Patrick Lane, Flabbergasted” is typical: “He could imagine that there was a way in which all the pieces came together and interlocked . . . it was a map, he thought, a net that cast itself outward, and if he only applied himself he would see how the weather would lift . . .”

Horror has always inflected Chaon’s fiction; never before, however, has the ectoplasm flowed so freely. Over the years, Chaon’s characters have encountered apparitions like the one in “Presentiment,” human teeth lying inexplicably in public ashtrays, abandoned towns overgrown with weeds, the sudden disappearances of strangers and loved ones alike, and the lengthening shadows of depression and schizophrenia. In earlier stories, however, the uncanny and the unexplained nearly always felt muted, understated, disturbingly tinged with the ordinary colors of reality. In much of Stay Awake, the uncanny controls the palette.

There are pitfalls to this approach, and not all of these stories are agile enough to avoid them. Certain moments, certain lines, fall flat. When Brandon opens the lid of an old board game in his dead parents’ house, “an enormous number of cockroaches came scuttling out of it.” A character in “Long Delayed, Always Expected” looks out a window at a winter storm and reflects that this is “the kind of night when you might expect to see a skeleton flying through the air, its ragged black shroud flapping in the wind.” Moments and lines like these are old standbys of the horror genre, but in stories as finely crafted and meticulously observed as Chaon’s, they thud on landing.

Furthermore, that shared palette is itself a risk. Whereas Chaon’s earlier collections feel diverse, with each story featuring particular and often idiosyncratic sources of tension, many stories in Stay Awake draw their tension almost exclusively from the same tonal landscape and set of concerns. Sometimes, then, these stories seem to blend, difficult to distinguish from one another in their shared paranoiac murk.

But that paranoia can be contagious. When my phone rang while I was reading “Patrick Lane, Flabbergasted,” I nearly jumped off my sofa. A minute later, I found myself trying to end the conversation quickly, so I could get back to the story. If Stay Awake falls victim to some of the shortcomings of the horror genre that Chaon is mining, the collection also reliably delivers many of that genre’s great pleasures.

And there are stories here that rank among Chaon’s very best, which is to say that they rank among the very best contemporary stories readers are likely to encounter anywhere. One such story, “Thinking of You in Your Time of Sorrow,” opens in tones of flat declaration—“The baby dies and there is a little funeral”—and continues in the same vein of almost unbearable directness; it is a rending portrait of grief, inadequacy, and guilt. “Shepherdess,” meanwhile, is a quieter story, its subtle pattern of two obliquely intersecting narratives building to a crescendo of loneliness. Both of these stories provide lessons in earning highly emotional climaxes, and they are all the more remarkable for earning those emotions in completely different ways.

“Thinking of You” and “Shepherdess” are both stories that would be at home in either of Chaon’s previous collections; they lack the phantasmagoric strangeness of many of the other stories from Stay Awake. This collection’s final story, however, “The Farm. The Gold. The Lily-White Hands,” could only belong here. Though it opens with the familiar strains of Midwestern reticence that characterize much of Chaon’s work, “The Farm” soon bends toward not merely the supernatural, but the metafictional as well. It’s nearly impossible encapsulate the story; suffice to say that it is emotionally fraught, horrific in all the traditional ways Chaon has worked with throughout the collection, formally daring, and intellectually engaging.

One can trace the legacy of an earlier story like “Presentiment” here: the emotional understatement, the way narrative tension is fragmented across multiple sources, the suspended ending that frustrates readers’ desire for a traditional sense of closure without frustrating the readers themselves, and the ominous sense that a world which once made sense has grown inexplicably “off.” But “The Farm. The Gold. The Lily-White Hands.” is its own new, bizarre, and compelling creature.

At its best, then, Stay Awake showcases a writer in mid-career who is not only at the top of his game, but who also refuses to settle. Chaon continues to develop, to push his work in new directions. Like Rich at the end of “Presentiment,” Chaon’s readers cannot predict what’s coming next; for the readers, if not for Rich, this is a fine feeling indeed.

Further Links and Resources

There’s music to the stories in Matt Mullins’s debut collection, Three Ways of the Saw. Nostalgia and longing that gets into the bloodstream and won’t let up until you see it through. The press materials from Atticus Books, a plucky indie press publishing some really fine new writers, liken Mullins to Cormac McCarthy, but that’s an imprecise shorthand. McCarthy’s work runs on epic rails. But within 230 pages, Mullins whipsaws through twenty-five intimate stories that leave you with snatches of lyrics and minor chords pounded hard and ringing in your ears.

Three sections compose the collection: I. Black Sheep Missives, II. Dischords, and III: Ghost Limbs. Black Sheep Missives follow one family, skipping back and forth in time and perspective. The stories concern the only son, in a sea of sisters, of a Catholic auto executive in Detroit, and how he parlays a childhood of advantage into a life disappointing to himself and parents alike. Flashes of crisis – the night before his wedding or confronting his father’s mortality through a photograph – never pin down where things went wrong, only that they have. The reader knows what, but must speculate about how and why. The prose throbs with elegiac Americana, “The first time I heard my dad say fuck we were driving through Utah in a rented Winnebago.” This may not be your memory, or mine, but nonetheless has that inherited patina of stories that could be ours.

The characters in Dischords are one hot mess: prodigals on a grand scale who don’t bother with that returning home nonsense. They self-aggrandize, but one feels they’ve got a right to it, since they so clearly have very little else going for them. Mullins has honed these stories to fender chrome. Lines grab you by the windpipe – “What’s a woman except a shot to the heart that didn’t kill you but won’t heal.” Only very rarely did a sentence not quite land, proving just artful enough to pull the reader momentarily into the no-man’s-land between awareness of the construction and being submerged in a story. “I sip my nth cup of black.” But that same taut diction makes a story like “I Am and Always Will Be” – a single encounter between a self-centered guy and the obese woman downstairs – skip through the mind like a pinball long after its three-and-a-half pages end. When Mullins pulls it off, which is often, those shots go straight to the heart.

Ghost Limbs delivers on its promise – lost lung, lost arm, lost scalp. Reading these stories will set you on edge, awaiting dismemberment, for the torpedo to surface and clear the deck. If the first sections reveal characters who are their own worst enemies, the final stories remind us just how fragile the human machine really is. “The Braid” pulls off hair as main character, something I’ve not encountered save for O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi.” But where O. Henry plays at the edge of maudlin, “Braid” is a five-page jitterbug ending in a punch to the solar plexus: two wealthy, gorgeous, world-at-their-feet types at an idyllic picnic. Mullins seeds the bower of pleasure with a darker note, so that when the birdsong abruptly falls away, and horror shatters the idyll, you realize your stomach’s been in knots since the opening line.

The title story, last in the book, is a masterpiece of perspective. An elderly man, dying from lung cancer, watches two younger men cut away a fallen honey locust he planted thirty years before. He hoped the tree would outlive him, but now he realizes his final days will be spent looking at the stump. His wife, a music teacher, clings to normalcy, “Because that’s what life does, it goes right on having accordion lessons in spite of us.” That “in spite of us” is the whole tragedy, these flesh and bones so brittle and frail in the face of all the accidents that could single us out.

You know these guys: the college buddy who whiles away a decade couch-surfing, smoking pot, and talking a big game while getting fired from minimum wage jobs he despises. He wants desperately to change, and you hope to God he can, but you can see in his eyes there’s a snowball’s chance he will. Mullins constructs tragedy in the most honest, classical sense: life’s bounteous choice stretches far as the eye can see, but character is fate.

Befitting the high velocity of so much of the work, nearly half the stories contain a road. Bands hit the highway to the next gig. The Winnebago rockets through a barren West. A school bus carries a fourteen-year-old girl to a retreat. A man indulges in an epic bout of road rage. In “Bad Juju, 1989” a couple drives to New Orleans in a last ditch effort to salvage their mangled love. If you’ve somehow escaped the misery of a relationship where basic human exchanges become diseased, let Mullins boil it down, “She can’t even tell him she has to go to the bathroom without pissing him off.” Hell on wheels, indeed. Three Ways of the Saw contains many satisfactions – beautiful fragments of youth, the skewed perspectives of paranoia, a bachelor’s last will and testament, second person narration that actually works. Like an album etched in memory, these stories and their vivid details keep resurfacing as I walk down wintery sidewalks. In “No Retreat” a 14-year-old girl on a Catholic retreat longs to impress a boy back home with some totem of the forest, “I’ll make his heart pound with mysteries.” Where his characters fail again and again, Matt Mullins succeeds.

Further Links & Resources

• In addition to his life of writing, Matt Mullins is a musician, experimental filmmaker and multimedia artist (which all make quite a bit of sense when you’ve read the collection). You can find some of his interactive works of digital literature (like the haunting “Highway Coda”) at lit-digital.com
• On the site for Three Ways of the Saw, Mullins has posted some excerpts from many of the stories – lots of them – and these paragraphs feel like the self-blurb equivalent of Chris Van Allsburg’s all-time classic The Mysteries of Harris Burdick. Go read them, you’ll get sucked right in.
• Mull: Mullins’s occasionally-updated blog.

Editor-in-Chief, Jeremiah Chamberlin, writes in the opening of his recent review of this collection:

Few authors possess the range or emotional depth that one finds in Jack Driscoll’s new story collection, The World of a Few Minutes Ago, published this month by Wayne State University Press. Whether writing from the point of view of a twelve-year-old boy accompanying his father on a secret run to the slaughter house, or a seventy-year-old man reassessing both his fifty-year marriage and career as a war photographer, or a sixteen-year-old girl driving through a snowstorm with her driver’s ed instructor, Driscoll manages to seat the reader in the lives of his characters with grace, despite a roughness that often characterizes their lived experience.

Later, he says of the book:

In addition to Driscoll’s technical mastery of voice, and his compassion for his characters, the book also possesses an impressive emotional continuity. Longing and grief permeate this collection. Though not always immediately felt, these emotions lie below the surface of each story like permafrost, lending the book a feeling of structural integrity, to say nothing of depth.

It also makes The World of a Few Minutes Ago feel like a unified project. Driscoll asks larger questions that the collection as a whole wrestles to answer. What is the nature of longing? What does grief look like as we transition through different stages of our lives? For what we grapple with in our late thirties or early forties is quite distinct from what we feel in the ages preceding and following this “middle” period of our lives.

It is chronicling these middle years—the thirties and forties—where Driscoll’s art truly sings. The emotional terrain of one’s thirties, what Jane Smiley so accurately termed “the age of grief,” is captured here in all its beautiful messiness. That grief stems from having been on this earth long enough to know the score—to know that it often doesn’t get better, that the road ahead typically holds more of the same—and, in spite of all that, to still harbor the hope that one lucky break could change everything. After all, it’s a fine line between delusion and optimism, between knowing when to step out of the ring and when to give it one more shot.

• To read the rest of this review, click here.
• For more on Driscoll’s new book, please visit Wayne State University Press’s website.
• You can also win one of three copies of this book, which we’ll be giving away next week to three of our Twitter followers.
• To be eligible for this giveaway (and all future ones), simply click over to Twitter and “follow” us (@fictionwriters).

To all of you who are already fans, thank you!