To make a beautiful piece means you have really witnessed it and really made decisions about it.

For a really long time [before writing the novel], I was watching a lot of serial killer movies and I started to wonder if this was a trend and if other people were doing the same thing. That's what happens when you suddenly have a critical perspective on your own behavior.

It's a matter of resisting what something made you feel before. And resisting that as a consumer is not easy. I know it isn't for me, and not just when I consume pop culture. When I go into a book and it feels too familiar, I don't have the energy to do it. My whole reason for reading it is to be in a fictive space that is unfamiliar to me.

So many of the stories are about perspective and viewpoint. It's not just about seeing and revelation. The idea of having many different stories from many different perspectives has something to do with me trying to deal with the impossibility of having a wide enough view to say anything really convincing on that scale.

One of the reasons I like to hang out with scholarly types is they can do a broad reach conceptualization of things that is astonishing to me. I'm really good at the particulars but I have to do an immense amount of critical thinking to make something larger of it.

Here is the alphabet of the pulsing apocalypse that is fatherhood, a book in love with what words, like parents, create: beauty, terror, awe.

I don't want to write the thing that I am a consumer of when I'm unconscious. I want to write the thing that makes me contend with the thing that I've been consuming unconsciously.

The short story is so much about inevitability and this feeling that things always had to be this one way, and I wanted the apocalypses to blow that idea apart. I hope it feels that way. I hope the book invites people to read the stories in order and then, if they feel like it, maybe not read them in order the next time.

Follow Through is elegant, sure footed, smart—a nest of sticks that won’t stay sticks—a nest of sticks that snowballs—scary and marvelous.

If you think it's worth writing a book about then that means you suspect that you're not the only one. You suspect that it has something to do with the larger patterns of your culture.