Who was it recently invented some machine that will enable her to sign a book from 5,000 miles away? Margaret Atwood. Get off your arse, love, and sign it in person. Publishers and circumstance made you a bestselling author. Give a little back.

What the short story needs above all is for one of the big publishers to get an equivalent series up and running and to support it and promote it.

I'm not trying to write cinematic novels, but I have been told several times that my style is cinematic.

Who was it recently invented some machine that will enable her to sign a book from 5,000 miles away? Margaret Atwood. Get off your arse, love, and sign it in person. Publishers and circumstance made you a bestselling author. Give a little back.

I always have lots of zany ideas for promotional stuff as publication nears.

The short story feels like the most natural length for prose fiction, or certainly for the kind of ideas and situations I like to encounter.

The idea that a student can write a sonnet or a novel without having a sound understanding about its history, and where it fits into literature as a whole, seems to me to be manifestly daft.