Actually, you’re not famous at all. Maybe you’ll get some traction after you’re dead?

Like no other writer in contemporary American literature, Brock Clarke has a way of looking at us, I mean looking straight at us--warts, lots of warts, and beauty and hypocrisy and love, too, the gamut. And hes done it again in this brilliant The Happiest People in the World, a novel that is as hilarious and thought-provoking as it is ultimately, deadly, deadly serious. I for one am grateful hes out there--watching our every move.

What you can do with a short story that you can't do with a novel is punch someone in the gut, in the best of ways.

A collection, for me, is a book of very diverse stories that somehow speak to each other, across wide geography, across time, years, decades.

I think some writers should wait for something to say.

Actually, you’re not famous at all. Maybe you’ll get some traction after you’re dead?

To me, and I'm sure for other writers, too, characters come back and they relive again, but what about those characters who only live for a page or two? Or for five pages or 10 pages. I like to think they're still out there - still living - but for me they kind of die, too. It's kind of sad. I don't think about them anymore unless I give them life again.