Podcast Appearances
Until Lincoln in the Bardo, you only wrote short stories.
And you are now, of course, renowned as one of the great living short story writers.
How much did Dybeck's story, Hot Eyes, play a part in setting you on that course of being a short story writer specifically?
In so many of your short stories, there is a sort of a hyper real quality.
There's a surrealism or an absurdity very often.
Subtext and other narratives that are spinning around our conversation.
In the late 1980s, you enrolled in a master's degree in creative writing at Syracuse University.
And it was there that you met your next choice for this cultural life, your wife, Paula.
And you said in the notes that you sent us that she gave you life changing advice about...
your first and catastrophic novel, which was called La Boda de Eduardo, and how this shot you into a new way of writing that you still use today.
So, first of all, what was that novel that you were writing?
You are now a teacher at Syracuse yourself, and you've been there, I think, since 1997.
One of your courses that you teach is on the Russian short story.
Particularly the work of Chekhov and Tolstoy, Turgenev, Gogol.
And that is the subject of that book that I mentioned before, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.
What have you learned from those writers in particular and those stories that they were writing?
You've built your reputation as a short story writer, but now having written your second novel, are you happier in the long form or will the short stories keep pulling you back, do you think?
Great fiction, great literature has played such a pivotal role in the history of American democracy.
What place does literary fiction have now in an increasingly divided America?
Do you ever sit down starting a new book with an agenda or is it far more organic and spontaneous?