was a finalist for the National Book Award. How did that honor (and others—you e one of The New Yorkers “20 Under 40” authors) affect your life as a writer, if at all?
Sunny weather for an afternoon, but they don’t change the climate I live in. I still go to the same desk, chair, blank piece of paper. I suspect the thing I’m writing right now would be much the same if my first book had never seen the light of day. In June, The New Yorker published your story, “The Kid,” which ends ambiguously, with its main characters left in limbo. Any idea why the editors chose that piece? I surely don’t know. But as to limbo: Even a story that murders all its characters in the last line has left the reader with the ambiguity of whether they will then proceed to an afterlife. I mean, the reader is a hope machine. The issue isn’t whether a story will answer all the hopes and questions it raises. The issue is how it will manage the drive we have for perfect resolution and the impossibility of our ever experiencing such a thing. We desire to leave the world of a story with our hopes either fulfilled or destroyed; both are the hopes of the infant mind we still carry wi
