There has to be a kind of grassroots push, a movement, as it were, against the inherent isolationism of American capitalism as practiced in the publishing industry. There need to be grants and government support and a few publishers, mainstream and independent, who are not afraid to challenge American readership. We need to build a network of translators, publishers and readers. We hope that our annual anthology might provide an upsurge in interest for European fiction and then, as we publish it every year, become a habit to many readers.

People will always tell stories. The publishing industry might vanish, but not stories.

I believe people are much more complicated than they can handle.

What you demand from storytelling is a moral - even political - import. I tend to shun that didactic aspect.

There's a social and human necessity for some kind of continuity, but it's not axiomatic and not something you're born into; it's something you have to work at. And one of the ways to work at it - perhaps the best - is storytelling: telling stories about yourself to others, telling stories about yourself to yourself, telling stories about others to others.

I'll take any life in which I can make choices and have agency, and America is not a bad place for all that.

All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is all that the world is.