My grandfather and I were very close.

In the end, all you want is someone to long for you when it comes time to put you in the ground.

My road to publishing actually came through a colleague who connected me to my agent, and the faculty at Cornell was very supportive.

I like dark subject matter. I'm not sure what that means about me!

Kelly Link's prose is conveyed in details so startling and fine that you work up a sweat just waiting for the next sentence to land. This is why we read, crave, need, can't live without short stories.

At the end of the day, despite all the other great things that literature does in society and in a person's life, I think that we read to escape. And I think that place, more than anything, provides that escape quickly, if an author is engaged with the place.

At the end of the day, it's about the reader's attachment to and belief in the magical elements that make or break magical realism.