Brett Evans

And he's got a very mordant, black sense of humour about the predicament of human beings.

And...

I find that very enjoyable in his short stories, yeah.

Yeah, well, it sounds like he's written a book, whereas my guy, Robert Drew, has collected a bunch of stories that he's written over the last few years and published elsewhere and put them all in one place, which is very kind of him because they're very enjoyable.

But it sounds like his ambition was different.

It was to create a thing unto itself which was interlinked and was resonating one story to another, whereas Robert Drew's are...

They're all completely different.

That's part of the fun of it.

Every time you start another one, you're in a completely different place.

So that seems to be the interesting thing, that he's created his book from scratch, whereas Robert Drew has looked at what he's done in the last 10 years and thought, oh, that should be remembered in a book.

I'll put that in a collection.

It's a very different process.

I was just thinking then it reminds me a bit like an album of songs.

Once upon a time, before the internet, people used to put out albums.

And I remember hearing Paul Kelly talk about they spent hours working out which track would follow which track and which would start and which would finish.

No one does that anymore because you just pluck the individual song out of the ether.

And a short story collection, I imagine, is a bit like that.

There's the individual stories.

But if you put it all in one book, you start to think, well, what are the connections and what should come first and what should come last?

A song is something that's concise, but something, if it's a really good song, you will listen to a lot of times.