I adore fairy tales, and with “Natural Skin,” I actually started with the core of “Snow White”: a young, beautiful girl with black hair and red lips, and an older woman full of murderous jealousy. For this story, I decided that I wanted to write about the complicated relationship between sisters as they go through puberty, watching their bodies change into something foreign.

For Paul and his mother, I wanted to write about people with no options. They recognize that the other needs serious help, but for both this help is beyond their means and so they can only watch as the other fails. And this helplessness has led to frustration and a breakdown in communication between the two; they no longer talk, and Paul prefers to dwell on what he remembers of her before his death.

I was living back in Tel Aviv for a little while and was captivated by the area of the giant bus station, which is were a lot of African refugees, and Asian economic migrants, had settled, and I wanted to kind of explore that, and in turn explore contemporary Israel, and Golden Age science fiction . . . a whole bunch of stuff.

Looking back through humanity’s history, we find time and time again that civilizations destroy themselves, either by starting wars with other civilizations, or by starting wars against their own people. It happens fairly regularly once a civilization gets big enough, and to me it’s this interesting paradox of “We have to work together to establish a niche for ourselves in the world, but if we get too big it falls apart.”

Short stories don’t give the writer a lot of time to work a wedge into the reader’s brain so you can split it open and fiddle around inside. A solid visceral image is a very fast, effective way to do that. Reading is often portrayed as an intellectual activity, but it can also be very bodily. Nothing reminds people of that, or grounds them in their bodies and short-wires the defenses that separate mind from body, quite like a little body horror.

The seed of this story actually came from watching my young son navigate kindergarten. Anand was having a really difficult time for much of the year; his instinctive response to frustration was often to lash out, and while he rarely actually hurt anyone (he’s quite small), that kind of behavior is obviously challenging in a public classroom setting.

This story in particular came about because of the different ways the word “witch” gets thrown around. In some cases, it’s a specific word used to describe a woman with magic—a woman with power. In others, it’s used as a pejorative term, used to describe a woman who isn’t liked. Who doesn’t behave as people think she should. So I wanted to play with the idea of being a witch as being a status crime.

The world captured in “A Moment of Gravity, Circumscribed” is a complex hierarchy, evocatively built on a city of living bone high above the clouds; what an image! There’s a lot of family secrets and deceptions, what drove you to tell us about such young protagonists with such gothic themes? You’ve written several novels set […]

To me, hope isn’t so much a talisman against sorrow as its dual expression—it’s what gets us through sorrow, but also what sharpens it and makes it almost unbearable, very much a double-edged sword. The idea of opposite things giving meaning to each other is definitely something I try to explore in my work. My novel The House of Shattered Wings is about finding beauty and hope (but also sorrow) in the ruins of a Paris devastated by a magical war.

Someone had to be the interviewer, so I figured, why not me? I love cameos, such as Vonnegut walking into his novels or, more prominently, Rob Reiner directing and playing the director in Spinal Tap. It certainly made things less complicated. I’m glad you didn’t notice story-me, though, because an interviewer should be invisible, like the never-named reporter in Citizen Kane.