I don't know what people should be reading. Only you know what you should be reading.

It used to be that you would go into a writing program and what you would learn was how to write a short story. You would pick up the magazines and you would be taught from the magazines how to write a short story. Nowadays student writers are learning to write novels because that market is gone, so the ones who are drawn to the form are doing it really for reasons of their own and that's really exciting.

You can go back and try to generalize, but then you end up saying things that all editors say about everything that ever gets published. Something about voice, about urgency, about actually having a story to tell.

I love having people around who are better interviewers than I am and who can make the time to do a really great job. All of the interviews that we've published are with people who really interest me.

If you wrote about sex the way Jim [Salter] writes about sex in nonfiction, you would be a sociopath.

When I was a book editor, I got used to being told that my tastes were dark or edgy. These are not words that would've occurred to me, but I was told that enough that I have to believe it's true - that I like things that some other people find off-putting or upsetting. My job is to publish stuff that I really, really care about. That might mean that it doesn't sit well with everybody.

Chekhov's stories are about the moment that a life goes off the rails and the price that will be paid - forever. That's a typical Chekhov story for you. Something that you're used to lying in bed worrying about at four in the morning, before you have the psychic defenses to kid yourself and tell yourself to get up and shower and go to the office.