Interview

Reviewers have called Siege 13 a "novel-in-stories."  What can linked story collections accomplish that conventional novels or unlinked collections cannot?
The writer Jack Hodgins wrote a great blurb for the Canadian edition of this book that claimed the form of the short story cycle is better for the material I deal with—multi-generational family stories, collective trauma, diaspora—because it captures the chaos of the times. I think this form is better able to present the fragmentary aspect of history. Unlike fragmentary novels (and there are a lot of these too), each story is complete in itself and yet situated in the book as a whole in a way that defies overall completeness. A novel can't really do this. It either tells an overarching story or presents fragments, but it can't do both in the way the short story cycle can. These stories zero in on an instant while the larger currents of causality are left forever in question. That seems to me a good way of tackling trauma, which somehow always seems so specific and at the same time so unfathomable.

Besides war and trauma, another recurring motif in Siege 13 is storytelling. We meet characters who are writers, obsessive patrons of small libraries, and...