“You know how questions can be hydras—you think you’ve solved one, and then two more sprout. I’m sure the desert will continue to baffle me in the future, but I’m excited to say my next book has more stamps in its passport.”
Join us for our eighth-annual celebration of the Short Story, as we dedicate the month of May to short fiction.
“I believe that if you’re looking closely at the world, it’s funny. Even the horrible things are funny in some way. And if you’re looking closely enough, everything’s also pretty sad. So I see it as my job not to shy away from either of those, and to let them coexist.”
“History, personal or collective, weighs on everyone in these stories, sculpting their inner lives. And yet, Tabucchi suggests, an unlikely transcendence is possible.”
“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.”
