“History, personal or collective, weighs on everyone in these stories, sculpting their inner lives. And yet, Tabucchi suggests, an unlikely transcendence is possible.”
“When I write about Japan, I want to get it right, but I wouldn’t say I’m nervous because I’m not Japanese. Just like I’m not nervous writing from the point of view of an elderly man because I’m neither elderly nor male. My gut tells me if I know enough about a place or character to get it right.”
“I hope readers feel some complicated empathy at the end of the book. Squirm a little, yes, but feel sort of happy about the squirm. That’s what I felt while writing it: Can I write this? Can I really sit still and commit this act of violence with my fingers? What does it mean about me that I did? And how do you actually explore human beings without getting into our inherent dark half? “
Diane Cook’s Man V. Nature is a “masterful blend of surrealism, fabulist storytelling, and good-old-fashioned apocalyptic fiction.”
“It’s funny how differently I read short story collections after working on this book. I never really used to look for continuities, common threads, repeated themes—in fact, if I saw them, I sought to ignore them. I only wanted to experience each story independently. But now I really am interested in the conversation the stories sustain.”
“Told in the third-person perspective of a young boy named Joshua, ‘Navigators’ follows this boy and his father as they engross themselves within the world of the fictional NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) video game Legend of Silence.”
“It was tempting to allow those two characters in ‘Body Asking Shadow’ to find a way to communicate with actual language in the final scene, but in the end it felt both truer to the story and more interesting to let them communicate only through unlikely means, and to have that nonetheless suffice.”
On her most recent collection, Almost Famous Women: “I was fascinated by the orbit of fame, the way it influences a power dynamic, or the way we are so quick to be reverent of greatness.”
“But quickly enough this tale reminded me of what I love about Baxter”: Jim Nichols on Charles Baxter’s story “Scissors.”
“…there’s always something more you can take out…”: Jim Nichols with Joshua Bodwell on his influences, Maine, and his new book, Closer All the Time.
