Collected Stories

"This is one of the two collections that I chose because I thought that they were inescapably influential when it comes to contemporary American writing. Amy has a way of offhandedly rendering dire emotional states. She’s always been breathtakingly tender and funny. The offhandedness combines with the tenderness to produce fiction that’s both dispassionate and compassionate, and I find that a rare and wonderful combination. Amy is considered a minimalist but I think that it would be more accurate to say that she’s a master of emotional indirection. There is a huge tension in her work, and in her protagonists, between guarding information and needing to release it. And one of the strategies her protagonists always choose is to talk about somebody else as a secret way of talking about themselves. She often writes about characters confronting trauma and the possibilities and limitations of recovery. As one character puts it, “Just because you’ve stopped sinking doesn’t mean you’re not still underwater”. Consolation and responsibility are her big subjects. There’s a line in one of her stories that I think could be in any of her stories. One of her characters says to another: “Can we take each other in?” That’s Amy in a nutshell. The fiction writers I admire the most are indicting themselves and their surrogates at least as much as they’re indicting anybody else. I don’t think of fiction as a chance to settle scores and I don’t think that the writers that I’ve cited do either. They do. They probably require more. Poems and short stories are in some way more similar than short stories and novels. Stories, even long short stories, rely a huge amount on what’s unstated and what’s implied. Novels tend to be more comprehensive. Most short stories, even traditional short stories, leave you forced to imagine what will follow. Traditional novels tend to tie everything up. But the anthology you’re referring to, Unleashed : Poems by Writers ’ Dogs , was just a playful undertaking."