Add to ORKGTHE WEEK is a collection of short stories. These stories engage the politicized (if not overly political) question of what it means to be human and to be in relation to other humans in the world. Some of the stories are quite compressed; I attempt to create effects in these pieces through subtraction, ellipsis, parataxis, and surprise. Other stories are more sustained, producing voices that address the reader directly or voices that follow the involutions of a thought, dwelling on minute details of consciousness; these pieces play with conventional short story elements (character, plot, rising action, falling action, etc.), although they often “fizzle” or turn sharply to unsettle reader expectation. I have found that it is very difficult to...