Object Lessons, as its title suggests, can be read like a how-to manual for fiction writers: It's been called an MFA between two covers by Publishers Weekly. What did this book teach you about what works and what doesn't in fiction?

What's interesting about this collection is how experimental several of the stories are: truly avant-garde. As such, it's by no means a "greatest-hits" collection as people understand it; many of the most-collected stories from our archive aren't represented. In that sense, it's interesting to see what makes the "canon" and what doesn't, and to think about why that is. Especially in the context of this book, which is to say, stories that writers genuinely revere. The divide, perhaps, between writers' writing, and what has for whatever reason passed into the more conventional canon.

There's a vein of thought out there that says in order to publish short stories, one must write something formulaic and polished—something that will strike a haggard slush-pile reader as basically competent, without challenging them too much. Why do you agree or disagree?

Well, that might get someone out of the slush pile, but it's unlikely to grab an editor, and that's what everyone is looking for—to be arrested, to be challenged, to be discomfited sometimes. Unfortunately, a lot of people don't need much encouragement to be formulaic; we all cling to what we know. Competence, however, is not the same thing, and should not be underrated!

Is there a standardizing influence that journals have? Do they create dominant aesthetics? Editors often say, if you want to know what we publish read the magazine. Is it possible to write a Paris Review story? Does this collection disprove that idea?

As you know, the Review has had only three editors in its history: It's inevitable that one person's aesthetic should be a guiding force, to a degree. I'd call it desirable. But if looking through the archive taught me one thing, it's that the fiction has been all over the map. The original mission statement declared that the magazine would publish anything "as long as it's good." They took that seriously.

Of course, the business is different. People are agented much more now. More writers get MFAs. These are both great things, but they're still more factors that might inevitably cut down on the diversity of what crosses our desks: Many writers' experiences are at least slightly similar in a way that wasn't true a few decades ago.

But, as you write in the introduction to the book, each story has its own rules. That can be challenging. Are there ever moments when you read something and are not sure if something is groundbreaking or horribly flawed?

Sure. It's easy to tell when something is terrific, and of course easy to tell when it's really bad for whatever reason. It becomes tricky when it's neither—or, hardest of all, when there's something special there, but the piece as a whole doesn't work. To what extent is that deliberate and not luck? Can the writer strip the rest away? Is he even willing to, or able to? How do you express this when the actual meat of the story—something the writer has surely worked on and thought about a lot—doesn't work? It's both exciting and extremely frustrating. And you never want to get someone's hopes up, make them put in a great deal of time and work, without some guarantee that you believe in it.