I'll never forget reading Chekhov's "A Doctor's Visit" on a train to Hawthorne, New York, and I got to the end - the scene where the patient says goodbye to the doctor and she puts a flower in her hair as a kind of thank you to him - and I felt like a cowboy shot from a canyon's top. This is a different experience from reading a novel, I think. The emotional effect is cumulative. Let's just hope market forces don't send short fiction the way of the dinosaur, because their sales are paltry compared to the novel and this is truly unfortunate.

I'm interested in the limits of personality, in the possibility of change, and the saving power of art. Do powerful works of art raise our consciousness to such a degree that we refrain from sliding into moral hazard? Do we take note? Or are we doomed to repetition?

By examining characters lighting the way to hell, as it were, are readers spared iniquity? Are stories a heeded warning, or merely an entertainment? Each story in the collection tries to wrestle with these questions.

Once when I went over my work with my Washington University professor, the late great Stanley Elkin, he pointed to a passage of mine and said: Stop vamping. It has remained a caution.

There was a long stint during my childhood after I gave up on being a pro football player - were talking sixth grade here - that I strongly considered a future writing and drawing comic books. I have been making stuff up ever since.

Hardcover and paperback forever. Someone carve that into a tree.

Perhaps it's simply the dual nature of marriage, the proximity of violence and love.