This Week in Fiction: Antonya Nelson
New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman talks with Antonya Nelson, whose story “Literally,” appears in the Dec. 3, 2012 issue of the magazine.
Treisman: Your story in this week’s issue, “Literally,” has a lot of moving parts: among them, a high-strung sixteen-year-old, an anxiety-ridden eleven-year-old, a bomb threat, children who go missing, the death of a wife and mother, and the appearance of a violent, criminal ex-husband. How hard is it to juggle this many elements in a piece of short fiction and still feel that you’re doing justice to the characters?
Nelson: I think that describing the characters’ experience of a single day is probably the only way to collect such seemingly unrelated subjects. This is an ensemble cast, whose day, although not terribly eventful, nevertheless includes the myriad ways they must make do with the many things that life has put in their way. I hoped to unveil the complicated and competing ways that parenting consumes a person—the chronic issues, and the presenting ones. Arriving home intact is sometimes success enough.
Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/SlqUQ6
