The Frog Hospital, a novel, Like Life, a Book of Stories, Self-Help, Stories, and Anagrams, also a novel.

Now, your stories especially here have one of the oddest combinations of tones, I think, in recent fiction. And I wondered how you manage the combination

that goes from hilarity to rage and from terror to, you know, drawing room comedy almost.

Well, you know, you just, you just pray, I guess.

I do feel, I suppose, when I'm in the world of a particular story,

that I'm just recording what would be true about that world

and what would be true about the emotional life of that world

and true to the physical

texture and details and psychological reality of that world. So I don't, I don't feel it's something

artificially, you know, imposed on the story that then has to be juggled. On the other hand,

of course, once you feel you've accurately recorded something

and you feel there's a kind of tonal mix in there, you have to be careful, obviously,

on the second and third and fourth drafts that things are registering and being read

the way you intend them to be.

But it's all a matter of luck and prayer and... and being read the way you intend them to be.

But it's all a matter of luck and prayer.

But it also, as I'm saying, it's meant to be a kind of accurate record of life and the world.

And it is, but at the same time, there seems to be a good deal of improvisational material also thrown in, a kind of wild comedy that will, for instance, rather than saying there's

trouble in the marriage, one of the narrators, I guess, essentially thinks the

word trouble, thinks of the music man, and the phrase it appears is right here in River

City.

So instead of using the word trouble, she's suddenly bissociating with a song, as characters

...