Forty Stories

"If we’re talking about the New Yorker , I do want to say that Deborah Treisman is the best editor I have ever met. I chose him because he strikes me as a searcher, very much like Janet Frame. It always seems to come from a desperate need to survive, to make sense of reality. In my education I learned a lot of maths and physics, and there is something about his mode of exploring that is like an equation or a riddle. It’s a much more intellectual take on storytelling, even if he doesn’t know what he wants to say in advance. “I write stories to try and discover something that I don’t know” Once, when I was teaching at NYU, I wanted to read my students my favorite Donald Barthelme story, which is called “Chablis.” I went to the Strand and bought Forty Stories and a copy of one of my books. Two story collections. I was standing in line and the bookseller looked young, like a student. He looked at the books I was buying and said, “Donald Barthelme and Etgar Keret. Wow! They’re my two favourite writers in the world.” I said to him, “Yes, and I’m one of them!” He looked at me and said, “That will be $29.95, please.” With Barthelme, I was in excellent company. In Barthelme’s stories, if a character opens a door, there’s a sense that Barthelme will ask himself, “What is outside? Is there a world?” For him, writing is creating in a God-like manner. “I imagine a guy, and he’s in a room, and he’s falling. No! He can fly.” There is rationality and structure, but it’s unfolding something that is folded. Emotion is down there and you’re trying to pull it out by its hair, but the first things that come are ideas and logic and thoughts."