“Even when I was in college, that’s always what my professors would say: ‘your voice is so detached.’ What does that mean? I don’t know! I don’t think you really get to choose the way your voice is on a page. A lot of these stories are extremely internal and that just felt natural to me. What’s supposed to happen in a short story? Is a comet supposed to hit? No! For me, the short stories I really love — not the only stories I love, but the stories I love best — are really, really quiet. They’re about someone just thinking and trying to figure something out. Like Margaret Atwood’s story, ‘Death by Landscape’ — she’s just thinking about her friend going missing at summer camp fifty years ago, but it’s really just an old woman sitting in her apartment. Perfect. I don’t need explosions.” – Emma Straub, in Full-Stop

“Somehow the same concerns keep coming up. Most of the characters seem to be confused, unsure of how it is they are supposed to live. This reminds me of the wonderful epigraph to Grace Paley’s Collected Stories, which itself is one of my favorite pieces of writing. Ms. Paley relays a story about her friend and colleague in the ‘writing and mother trade.’ She asks Grace a few days before she dies, ‘The real question is, how are we to live our lives?’ The narrators and characters always seem to be entirely baffled by their circumstances. They find themselves put upon and disconnected. They usually cannot account for what has happened to them, let alone how to address the problem(s). Another concern is language and how inadequate it can be. I never consciously set out to write about these issues, but these issues keep coming up.” – Robert Lopez, in Bookslut

“A novel determines its own size and shape and I’ve never tried to stretch an idea beyond the frame and structure it seemed to require. (Underworld wanted to be big and I didn’t attempt to stand in the way.) The theme that seems to have evolved in my work during the past decade concerns time—time and loss. This was not a plan; the novels have simply tended to edge in that direction. Some years ago I had the briefest of exchanges with a professor of philosophy. I raised the subject of time. He said simply, “Time is too difficult.” Yes, time is a mystery and perhaps best examined (or experienced by my characters) in a concise and somewhat enigmatic manner. Next book may be a monster. (Or just a collection of short stories.)” – Don DeLillo at PEN

“In order to be as free as I possibly can, in my own imagination, I can’t take positions that are closed. Everything I’ve ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it, to open doors, sometimes, not even closing the book — leaving the endings open for reinterpretation, revisitation, a little ambiguity. I detest and loathe [those categories]. I think it’s off-putting to some readers, who may feel that I’m involved in writing some kind of feminist tract. I don’t subscribe to patriarchy, and I don’t think it should be substituted with matriarchy. I think it’s a question of equitable access, and opening doors to all sorts of things.” – Toni Morrison, in Salon

“I grew up as a New Critic at Kenyon College. It was an historical response, you know, to a real lack of precision in critical thought. It was valuable in drawing attention to the text-in its presumption that the text itself could teach you everything you needed to know about it. I think what you describe as lethargy has more to do with the fact that with the Cold War the entire country, including a large part of the intellectual community, turned right. Domestically, the Cold War at its worst was a kind of civil religion with distinctly Puritan cruelties. People were cowed. It’s true that a generation rose up against the ideology in the 1960s, but by the seventies they were pretty well mopped up. The ranks of the public critics began to thin-the generations behind Edmund Wilson, Irving Howe and Alfred Kazin disappeared into the academy. Fled, one might say. There seemed to be a depoliticization of cultural life, generally. It was clear the USSR was a terrible mistake. But the correlate to that was … that anyone in America who wrote a political novel was writing a foolishly adversarial novel. It was possible according to Cold War orthodoxy to appreciate political novelists like Kundera from Czechoslovakia, or Coetzee or Gordimer from South Africa, but the American political novel was an egregious aesthetic error. A novel about an heroic CIA operative could be a good story… but a novel about a conscientious objector was a political tract.” – E.L. Doctorow, in Weber Journal

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