Last week I did a long interview with Deborah Treisman, the fiction editor of the New Yorker, which should be interesting to just about anyone who writes fiction (the magazine is the most prominent place in the country to publish stories, and Treisman talks about how they choose the stories they choose, whether she prefers certain kinds of stories over others, how she felt when a story of hers was rejected when she was 11, the magazine’s “voice,” the ratio of male to female writers who submit to the magazine, international writers, gay writers, the magazine’s infamous editing process, the Atlantic’s recent decision to ax short stories on a monthly basis) as well as anyone who reads the New Yorker and wonders, for example, why they recently chose to publish a short story set into motion by a guy who almost gets hit by a beer bottle but doesn’t.

The interview was going to be the basis for a column by me in the paper that comes out on Wednesday, but as there is no room for a column by me in the paper that comes out on Wednesday, the whole interview is posted here for you to read and enjoy.

And while you’re at it, the story in this week’s New Yorker, by Aleksander Hemon, is fucking spectacular.