That’s something that happens a lot in this anthology we’ve published. You see a narrator on the edge of meaning he or she doesn’t quite grasp. The last line of Amie Barrodale’s story “William Wei,” for instance, is: “I think I can safely say it changed my life.” But I don’t really know how. It’s not that the narrator is delivered into insight. It’s not that the reader knows, either. The questions remain as alive as the answers. But for that to happen, you have to believe in the voice itself. The narrator has to exist as a steady reliable fact.

That seems to me especially true of contemporary fiction. I’m not sure why. I’d guess it has something to do with the fact that we don’t read the way our parents or grandparents did, and that writing has become a more and more specialized, marginalized activity. That’s not a bad thing, necessarily. But it means we’ve become interested in the fiction of the speaker. Interested, suspicious, aware. We might ask—in a way that our grandparents wouldn’t have asked—why someone is sitting down at the keyboard at a Starbucks and doing this? It’s no longer given why someone would tell a story on paper, or onscreen. It’s become a troubling question.

So we have all these first-person narrators. When it’s done right, fiction provides the authority to speak about deep things; at the same time, it provides a shield, a mask. The mask lets you say things, talk about things, that you couldn’t ordinarily talk about. You don’t have to make sense in quite the same way. You don’t have to account for yourself in the same way. You don’t have to pretend that you’re a single subject. You don’t have to pretend you’ve got free will. You don’t have to pretend that you’re the master of your conscience. Or that you don’t have forbidden desires that you act on. You can talk about shameful things. I mean, whatever else it is, “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” is a story about shame. And I think literary writing in the first person is very good at dealing with shame. Not getting rid of shame, but exploring it—from behind a mask.

I think there’s a kind of realism—not just in stories, but in poems and essays—that assumes we live in dishonesty, that we lie to others and ourselves as a matter of survival, but that part of us knows the truth when we see it. That’s what interests me: the truths we can’t tell except when we put on the mantle of this authority. That’s the kind of realism I see in this anthology.

This is actually the first anthology of new writing that we’ve done in more than 50 years. There’s something new happening, and it’s been happening for The Paris Review, too—we’ve been lucky. I haven’t yet seen a book that’s captured this moment in our literature, that’s captured our changing relationship to the narrator and point of view. Writers grow up more slowly than they used to. With a very few exceptions, everything in the book was written by someone in his or her 30s. Nowadays that seems to be the age at which many writers come into their own. The moment when they have something to say and the tools to say it.

There’s nothing better, as an editor, than being sent something arresting by a writer whose name you don’t yet know. Usually, the quality just jumps out at you. When you start reading something that’s really an achieved work, it doesn’t matter who the writer is, or whether or not they’ve published. It just calls out to you. You turn off the computer. You sit down. And you read it.