Usually at the end of each story we're thrown clear out of the story's world and then we're given a new world to enter. What's unique about a linked collection is that it can deliver both sets of narrative pleasures - the novel's long immersion into character-world and the story anthology's energetic (and mortal) brevity - the linked collection is unique in its ability to be both abrupt and longitudinal simultaneously.

What we [writers] do might be done in solitude and with great desperation, but it tends to produce exactly the opposite. It tends to produce community and in many people hope and joy.

She's applying her lipstick; I've always believed that the universe invented the color red solely for Latinas.

Nothing more exhilarating ... than saving yourself by the simple act of waking.

I feel most like myself... after I run - I go out for five miles every morning.

In '94, I started writing a novel about an enormous terrorist act that destroyed the United States. The novel takes place twenty years after this destruction, with all the stuff that we're dealing with now - a dirty war, the disappeared, the concept of terrorism. Anyway, 9/11 happened some years into the process, and I was like, OK, I don't have a novel.

If you were a nerd computer geek in 1982, the amount of isolation you felt - at least what I experienced, or the kids I knew, the isolation they felt - was almost total. They were not part of society; no one thought they were cool.