Describe your latest project.
The Inhabited World is an unconventional ghost story — unconventional in that it's not about spooking the living, nor is it a fairy tale like, for instance, the movie Ghost. The word "ghost" never appears in it. The story concerns the afterlife of a suicide, a man named Evan Molloy, who inhabits the house and property where he lived and died.

My working title was "Purgatorio." I wanted Evan to exist in an intermediate state. He knows he's not alive, yet he's somehow here. His task is to try to understand why. Is it permanent? Is there a reason for it? Toward the end of his old life, he'd gotten so rattled he couldn't see the good in things. He had a bunker mentality. But now the world fascinates him. In particular, his believes he's supposed to keep his eye on the current occupant of the house, a woman in her late 30s, Maureen Keniston, who has her own troubles. It turns out that there are certain parallels between their two fates — they're both in purgatory. Suicide is a tough subject, but I don't want readers thinking it's a grim book. It isn't. It has its moments of humor and sexiness, and ultimately it's an upbeat story.

How did the last good book you read end up in your hands and why did you read it?
We hear horror stories about the state of American publishing — the death of serious literature, the blockbuster mentality, the dumbing down... But in certain ways ours is a good time to be a reader. Readers have an unprecedented ability to talk to each other, to pass on information — getting someone else to read a great obscure book you've liked is a huge pleasure for readers. Since the rise of the internet, I've been clued into dozens of lesser-known but wonderful books I wouldn?t otherwise know about — and in a matter of seconds, a few clicks, I can have copies on their way to me from Portland, Chattanooga, the U.K...

Like many readers I'm addicted to list-making (I admit to having a "life list" of novels read). My website includes a bunch of book lists — including a new one called "fives": five Czech novels; five short, odd novels; five good novels you may not have heard of; five skewed-reality novels. And so on.

All that said, the last good book I read was urged on me by a friend in Tacoma — a reissued copy of Joan Silber's amazing first novel, Household Words [1980].

Introduce one other author you think people should read, and suggest a good book/place to start.
Here's three: William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow [1980] — short, wise, elegaic, modest, lovely, true. Stump, Niall Griffiths, [2003] — profane, low-life, very funny, contemporary, Brit. Jos? Saramago, Blindness [1995] — one of the great books, by Portuguese Nobel laureate, gripping, one-of-a-kind, creates in the doctor's wife one of the most powerfully humane characters in literature.

Offer a favorite sentence or passage from another writer.
I used to tell my MFA students that our workshop had a final exam (this was largely mischief on my part). Anyway, it was a one-question take-home: What's your favorite sentence (of someone else's) and why? I thought they ought to be thinking about sentences. I wanted them to argue within themselves — did they like this one better, or this one? I wanted them to notice how they were drawn to the odder candidates, and I wanted them to acknowledge that there's a mystery to this attraction.

I have lots of favorites, but here's a quirky one [actually two sentences] from Denis Johnson's short story, "Work" (in Jesus' Son):

I felt weak. I had to vomit in the corner — just a thimbleful of gray bile.

Why do you write?
I don't write for self-expression, or because it's fun (the way harmonica-playing is fun), or be-cause I'm trying to impart a message. My life as a writer is intimately tied up with my life as a reader. Saul Bellow put it as well as I've ever heard it said: A writer is a reader moved to emulation. I write because things I've read incited an urge in me to be among the people who write — the way acting performances make certain people want to be actors, or cello performances make certain people want to play the cello. Beyond that, I like the process of making things, the craftwork — I think what I do is closer to what a cabinet maker does than to, say, an editorial writer. And within the act of writing, it's not the big structures of plot that interest me most, it's the micro level, the sentences.

What is your favorite indulgence, either wicked or benign?
Um, the Friday, Saturday, Sunday NY Times crossword; the Fox Soccer Channel; Law and Order re-runs; coffee; more coffee.

Make up a question of your own, and answer it.
Q: You're on record as believing that each of your projects should be a departure from what came before. But is there any connection between The Inhabited World and your earlier fiction?

A:I've always been interested in life's flukiness, how slim the margin between success and failure can be, how it can hinge on a small detail, a small choice.

A number of years ago, a light plane crashed into the mountains not far from where I lived in Northwest Montana. I happened to know one of the Search and Rescue people, and I learned that the plane had come so close to making it over the ridge that when it hit its engine broke off and came to rest on the other side. I found that a devastating image, and built a short story around it ["Clearance"]. In various ways, the idea of the near-miss, or its flip side, keeps com-ing back in whatever I write.

In The Inhabited World, a man finds himself in a downward spiral that leads to his death. Looking back, from his peculiar new vantage point, he sees that right up until the last moments, the outcome could've been different. His depression wasn't the utterly black, utterly hopeless variety. His was "a surmountable despair" — he just didn't surmount it.

There's a piece of wisdom my father drummed into me (I'm sure it had been passed through our family for generations): "Battles are won by the remnants of armies." What he meant is that winning can be a matter of outlasting your enemy when you're both beleaguered, both badly worn down. Sometimes you just need that extra five percent of staying power. That's what this book is about.