From the Archives: Christopher Mohar talks with Anthony Doerr about the politics of writing, the importance of curiosity, the role science plays in his fiction, why he likes the novella as a form, and how we can successfully inhabit characters different from ourselves.
“Trying to be weird and strange isn’t as interesting as coming up with a reason for it,” Arthur Bradford says of his 2001 short story collection, Dogwalker, in an interview with Robert Birnbaum. Labeling Bradford’s work “weird” may be a bit of an understatement, given stories that include a woman giving birth to a glowing frog, a family of cat-faced carnival workers, a human/canine love affair, and all manner of mutant dogs: talking, three-legged, Siamese triplets, born with furry flippers instead of legs, etc. But Bradford makes the strange seem not only usual, but welcome and beautiful. Bradford’s weirdness is […]
