Photo credit: Nate Kauffman
Describe your latest book.
Other People’s Love Affairs is a short story collection, assembled over the course of many years from what seemed at first to be unrelated stories, but that later began to coalesce around a fictional village, Glass, on England’s southwestern coast. I wanted the book to gaze intimately at the residents of this village, to explore their most private wishes and regrets in the manner of, say,
Dubliners or
Winesburg, Ohio. I have always been drawn to fiction that recognizes and takes seriously the intense but muted dramas of everyday life, and those characters who may not be able to envision themselves as the protagonists of their own stories. I wanted, I suppose, to restore something to them...