When the long-awaited collapse of apartheid in South Africa ushered in democratic elections in 1994, some readers feared that Nadine Gordimer’s fiction would lose its inventive energy and moral force. But Gordimer, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991, remained a vocal human rights activist and almost serenely continued to produce novels and stories, at least a few of which rank among her best. With Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black, her 11th collection of stories (and 25th work of fiction), Gordimer, 84, continues to perturb and delight readers with her mastery of the short story form.

"I love to write stories. It’s such a wonderful form, like poetry, because it’s so distilled," Gordimer says during a call to her home in Johannesburg. Gordimer has lived in her " big old house" and written on an electric typewriter "in a very small room downstairs" for most of her adult life. She chose to remain in South Africa even after the government banned three of her books. Her husband, to whom the new collection is dedicated, died six years ago, after 47 years of marriage.

Gordimer says that the remarkably tight construction she achieves in her stories is a subconscious process. "I’m not conscious of compressing it while I’m doing it. If there’s something that captures my imagination or that I begin to ponder, I know right away whether it’s going to be a short story or whether it’s the germ of a novel. To me a short story is like an egg: When the beginning comes to me, I have the end. It’s complete. It’s got its white and it’s got its yolk and it’s got its shell containing it. I have it there complete, as if in the palm of my hand."

The textures and resonances of the stories in Gordimer’s Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black are as varied as an omelet, a soufflŽ and a hard-boiled egg. In the title story, for example, Gordimer continues to explore the scars left on the souls of South Africans by apartheid. Her protagonist, an intellectual and former anti-apartheid activist, goes in search of evidence of his own racial identity, after pondering the likely history of his great-grandfather’s time in the diamond mines.

"I got the idea from an announcement [about Beethoven] I heard on the radio," Gordimer says. " I thought, what does this poking back into the personal life, the DNA really, of a very, very great composer matter. But of course in some circumstances it could matter very much, and that’s where my story comes from. There’s a longing among many white South Africans to find what was denied before. You know, tucked away in a cupboard somewhere there was a black grandfather, or great-grandmother. I think it’s a natural impulse for people to want to explore that. And an honest one. That honesty was missing before."

In a story called "Gregor," Gordimer shows a playful side, writing with light and shadow about a cockroach stuck under the small viewing screen of her electric Olivetti, summoning also the spirit of Franz Kafka.

"I’ve resisted over many years any reference to Kafka or any kind of Kafka pastiche because everybody drags Kafka in," Gordimer explains. "But this is the only story in the book that is about something that really happened. That beetle or cockroach was there in my typewriter. Writing is a solitary business and having this unwanted partner or overseer was a very strange experience. I couldn’t resist. I named him Gregor. How could I possibly do anything else?"

Among Gordimer’s own favorites is a story called " Dreaming of the Dead" in which the author summons three departed friends Susan Sontag, Edward Said and Anthony Sampson to a dinner at a Chinese restaurant in New York. It is a story about friendship, vivid conversation, writing and political commitment, at once both sorrowful and funny. "It’s the only story I’ve ever written that way," Gordimer says. "It’s a kind of homage to people that I loved who have gone. But I also, of course, amused myself as I know they would do to me by making fun of them."

Turning reflective, Gordimer says, "I began to write very, very young in the small gold-mining town in South Africa where I was born. I didn’t come from a family with any literary tradition, but my mother read a lot, [and] she encouraged reading. Indeed the most formative thing for me was that she made me a member of the children’s library in this little town. And every Saturday, we would go to the library and select three books each for the week. And then when there were birthdays and Christmas and so on, the presents for me were always books. That was what I wanted and what I got. By the time I was 12, the librarian at this local library, who was also a friend of my mother’s, allowed me the freedom of the library. I wasn’t confined to the children’s section. I read everything from D.H. Lawrence to Thucydides. Nobody was guiding me. I was like a pig in clover and I found what I wanted and what was nourishing to me. The local library was unbelievably important to me. It was my real education."

Gordimer says that even in her 80s, she maintains the same writing routine she developed in her 20s. " My writing routine was constricted because I had a small child and was divorced and was living alone with her. My writing time was when she was at nursery school in the morning. I think it was good that it was constricted because when you’re a writer, you’re your own boss and unless you’re disciplined, you’re never going to get down to it. Later on my circumstances changed but I still kept to my routine."

"Indeed," Gordimer adds with a laugh, " I just finished a new story last week. A weird little story. I have no idea what will happen to it."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

Until she moved to Columbus, Ohio, to pursue an M.F.A. in creative writing, Claire Vaye Watkins couldn’t imagine writing a story set in her home state of Nevada. Her early stories of young lovers and parents tended to be set in exotic locales like Hawaii, where, according to family mythology, her relatives ran a “mango-cum-pot farm.”

“It hadn’t occurred to me that Nevada or the desert was interesting to anyone,” she says by phone from Columbus.

Watkins, who is 28, now has what she calls a “big-girl job” teaching writing at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, but at the time of our conversation she’s back in Ohio for the graduation ceremonies of her beloved, writer Derek Palacio. “When I came to Ohio it was the first time that I had ever met people who weren’t from Nevada or California. It seems quaint to say the move changed my worldview. But it did. My friends from New Jersey would say, what a weird place Nevada is; did you ride your horses to school? So it occurred to me that it was interesting to people.”

Thus was born Watkins’ powerful debut collection of short stories, Battleborn (the book’s title derives from Nevada’s nickname, “the battle born state,” because it became a state during the Civil War).

“Early on I was often crippled about being able to write about anything, . . . Eventually I decided to choose place as my form,” she says. “By the end of the collection, I was actually looking at a map and thinking, where haven’t I written about? I couldn’t really start a story without understanding where it was set—because I can’t really start to think about who these characters are and what kind of trouble are they going to get into if I don’t even know what they see when they get up in the morning.”

"I think my relationship to my dad and his involvement in the Manson family has always been a storytelling relationship."

And Watkins’ characters do get into all kinds of trouble. In the electrifying story “Rondine Al Nido,” for example, a 30-year-old woman trades stories with a new lover about shameful things they’ve done in the past and remembers herself at 16 traveling from a small Nevada town to Las Vegas with a naïve friend, looking for danger, and pushing her friend toward self-destruction among a group of frat boys.

“Some people have said my [stories] are gritty, but I don’t think of it like that at all. I just want to be true to real experience. So thinking about a teenager in rural Nevada who lives over the mountain range from Las Vegas like the girls in ‘Rondine Al Nido,’ well, we used to take those trips all the time, tell our parents we were staying at someone’s house and then go into Vegas to see if we could get into some trouble. I didn’t want to whitewash it by saying this was just a story of hijinks, like getting change out of the fountains and buying hamburgers with it. We were after danger and destruction there.”

Many of the characters in Battleborn teeter at the edge of physical or psychological catastrophe. But in the best of these 10 stories, Watkins’ prose possesses the bright clarity of desert sunlight—she has been compared to Joan Didion—with the result that even her most lacerating tales can be oddly exhilarating.

The first and best story in the collection is “Ghosts, Cowboys,” a haunting exploration of the troubling mythologies surrounding her father, Paul Watkins, an early and important member of the Charles Manson family.

“I don’t know much about my dad. He had Hodgkins disease and died when I was six,” Watkins says. “So it’s hard to know if I actually remember anything about him. Stories become memories, you know? And in our family the stories that you tell about dead people are pretty flat, so that person becomes a very one-dimensional character. I mean the stories I get from my family about my dad are: He was a good man and he loved you very much. That’s not really enough. I have been so very, very curious about him my entire life.”

Watkins says she discovered that her father had been a member of the Manson family when she was 10. “I learned because a kid had been teasing my sister at school about it. We came home and asked my mom. And she said, yeah, he was in the Manson family but he didn’t kill anyone, and she gave us Helter Skelter. We looked him up in the index and read about him. We were happy that he hadn’t killed anyone and we just kind of went on with our lives,” she says.

“I think my relationship to my dad and to his involvement in the Manson family has always been a storytelling relationship. I have been asked in the past if I’m interested in writing a memoir about it. But that doesn’t really interest me. On the other hand, it is interesting to think about him in terms of the American West and my own family mythology. I think that’s why fiction is the place that I worked it out, or tried to. I think that felt right because art is about trying to understand yourself and who we are.”

Watkins says one of her earliest introductions to storytelling culture came through Alcoholics Anonymous. Her mother and stepfather “were in recovery and were very involved in the 12-step club. I spent much of my childhood in the car. When we lived in Tecopa, California [a town of 100 inhabitants in the Mojave Desert on the southern edge of Death Valley], there was no grocery store or hardware store there. So once or twice a month, usually on the first or the 15th, we would drive either into Pahrump, Nevada, where there was a grocery store which was quite expensive, or we’d drive into Las Vegas. And we would listen to AA tapes in the car on those long drives,” she recalls.

“AA is a culture where the story, your story, is really important. But it’s not just any story, it’s your rock-bottom story, your worst story. I think that sometimes gets simplified into: It was bad and now it’s good. So we used to listen to these speaker tapes that were really thrilling to me for probably like the first 90 percent, and then the last 10 percent came—you know I was a kid—and I remember asking my mom: can I listen to something else?”

As a teenager, Watkins planned to become a filmmaker rather than a writer. By the time she entered the University of Nevada, Reno as an undergraduate, her ambition was “to be a geologist and a feminist critic. But that didn’t work out.” Besides, she’d run into Christopher Coake, a teacher she refers to as “my guy, my mentor and my friend.” He and a handful of writers whose writing stayed with her—F. Scott Fitzgerald, Amy Bender, Louise Erdrich, Joan Didion, Mary Gaitskill—made a writing career imaginable.

In Battleborn, the first step of that career, Watkins undertakes some astonishing fictional explorations of the mythologies that have shaped her—from family stories to the lore of the American West.

The stand-out novella-length “The Diggins,” for example, is a harrowing Gold Rush-era story of two brothers who come West from Ohio to make their fortunes in the goldfields. In it Watkins deftly mimics the syntax of 19th-century 49ers’ letters while at the same time exploring the violent, despairing human stories at the root of our national myths of Manifest Destiny and rugged individualism.

Much closer to home is “The Archivist,” a story in which the central character imagines a museum of lost love curated from the detritus left in her exes’ jeans pockets. “The moment when the character says the mother wing of the museum would probably be empty?” says Watkins, whose mother died of a prescription-drug overdose the month before she graduated from college. “My own mother wing would probably be a not-very curated place, very messy and very chaotic. I think I’ll probably be sorting that stuff out for the rest of my life.”

Some months after he won the Pulitzer Prize for his dazzling first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz overheard a friend telling other friends: Listen, Junot won the Pulitzer Prize and we never had a party, we never went out for drinks, he like never mentioned it!

“I would point out that I come from a family where there was no celebration of AN-Y-THING!” Díaz says during a call that reaches him in Boston. Díaz teaches writing and “the traditional grammars of storytelling” to “super-energized kids” studying new media at MIT during the spring semester. He lives and writes in Manhattan the rest of the year.

Díaz, who was born in the Dominican Republic in 1968 and moved to a working-class, immigrant community downwind from one of the largest landfills in central New Jersey in 1974, explains that he grew up in a military family where the attitude was: Why should we bake a cake for you for doing what is considered your duty?

“Prizes are wonderful,” Díaz says. “They sell your books, they get you invited to places you would never be invited. I would never give mine back. But I know them fundamentally for what they are. They’re just today’s applause. They have no bearing on whether a piece of art or an artist will exist into the future. I’m more preoccupied with that. And I think that preoccupation frees your art in lots of ways.”

Of course, artistic freedom has its price. The vaulting energy and seeming spontaneity that are among the hallmarks of Díaz’s breathtaking stories and his novel arise from exacting labor. “I’m such a slow writer,” Díaz says. “I require absolute solitude. I am part of the no-distractions universe.” He says he conceived of the shape and texture of his new story collection, This Is How You Lose Her, in 1995, so it has taken him roughly 17 years to bring it to fruition.

"The one principle that we have in literature and art is that the universal arises from the particular."

“I needed a framework to start out. I had this idea of writing a book of collected stories about the rise and fall of a cheater. What drove me nuts was getting this whole thing from beginning to end pieced together. It’s like building a building. I won’t say it’s like building a cathedral, but it’s sort of like building a barn. You want to get it working and you want to get everything fitted nicely,” he says. “What drove me bananas was searching for, wrestling with the missing beams. Had it been a novel, I think it would have been a very different book, and one day I will write a novel about the rise and fall of a cheater, but I wanted to do this as a kind of fragmentary whole.”

The nine stories in This Is How You Lose Her, with settings in Santo Domingo, New Jersey and Boston, and told from third, second and first person points of view, do indeed explore, among other things, the vicissitudes of loving and being loved by another human being. In the story “Otravida, Otravez,” for example, Yasmin, who works in a hospital laundry room where she does her lover’s laundry in secret, is buoyed by her lover’s hopeful seriousness that they will soon buy a house together and crushed by thoughts of the letters her lover’s wife sends to him from back home in the Dominican Republic. But there are also stories like “Invierno,” an aching portrayal of the chilling isolation of young children who arrive to begin new lives in the United States in the dead of winter.  In the vortex of many of these stories is Díaz’s recurring character Yunior.

“Really why I’m drawn back to Yunior consistently, persistently has a lot to do with who the hell this guy is. Yunior is someone who recognizes at an intuitive level, at an emotional level and at an intellectual level how ­f__ked up and flawed he is. He has a heart with a utopian impulse. He wants to be in love. He wants a normal, healthy, nourishing relationship. He knows that one of the great challenges of the human condition is to connect with someone else, fundamentally and intimately, and he longs for that. He has all these recognitions, but he’s not capable of stopping himself from doing all the f__ked up things he wants to do. He’s got this tragic condition where he can recognize in himself his limitations, but he doesn’t have the strength to transcend them. But he’s also aware that there’s a social dimension for his problems. I don’t think he looks at the social dimension to escape responsibility or blame. He’s the kind of guy who in condemning himself throws a light onto the world we live in. Which is quite different from condemning the world as a way to avoid recognizing the part we play in it.”

Asked about the autobiographical nature of these stories, which in some ways mirror the physical and emotional geographies of his own life, Díaz says, “The way you’ve got to chip your life away for it to work as a story or as a novel is just incredibly deforming. By the time you get done wrangling your life into the form that can fit into the box of fiction, it doesn’t look like your life anymore.”

Still, these stories—all of his work, in fact—generate voltage from Díaz’s uncommon ability to evoke the alternating currents, the back and forth toggle from one culture to another, that comprise a soul-wrenching dimension of first-generation immigrant life. Díaz’s stories also deploy a scintillating blend of English and Spanish and broad literary references. His books—and conversation—romp from smooth academic-literary tonalities to earthy descriptiveness and expletives and back again. All of which, Díaz indicates, is consciously used to capture the particularity of contemporary human experience.

“Thermodynamics has these neat, tidy little laws that hold true, and evolution has all these great little principles that hold true. The one principle that we have in literature and art is that the universal arises from the particular. It’s the actual thumbprint uniqueness, it’s the granular idiosyncratic, one-of-a-kindness of a work of art that gives it power across time, across space, across language, that allows it to clear that most terrible of all barriers, the barrier that separates one soul from another. We’re still reading Shakespeare because Shakespeare was so incredibly particular. . . . Hamlet rings across the ages because Hamlet is a f__king Dane, not in spite of it.”

Díaz, a voracious reader who walked miles to his local library to borrow books as a child, credits Sandra Cisneros with opening his eyes to his literary mission. “She was the first contemporary Latina author that I ever met. Her book Woman Hollering Creek was everywhere during my first year in college. I had never seen a book like that. I grew up in central Jersey. I grew up listening to Siouxsie and the Banshees and the f__king Furious Five. I felt there wasn’t anything that was coming close to our experience, you know? My entire cohort of friends were college nerds, we were kids who worked and went to school, and I felt, wow, who is covering that experience? Then I encountered Woman Hollering Creek and the Brothers Hernandez’s Love and Rockets comics and I suddenly recognized the dimensions of my calling.”

Reading, Díaz says, remains central to that calling. “I cannot write without having at my back a whole bunch of works and books and authors who came before,” he says. “What feeds my writing is reading.”

Then Díaz shifts the discussion back to teaching. “For me teaching is a wonderful civic duty, a great way of giving back. There’s that Maya Angelou sense that the debt of knowing is to teach. I’m teaching at the heart of what we could call the practical machine. If there is any place where this country’s indifference to art and its sense that art is at best a privilege and at worst irrelevant [could make sense], it would be an institution like MIT,” he says.

“What really pulls me to this teaching is that I take kids who have a billion reasons why they shouldn’t spend a nickel’s time on art and try to convert them to the belief that there is no authentic human life possible without an engagement in art. If I can do that, well, I feel like I’ve done a f__king good thing.”

Award-winning writer Joan Silber returns with another stunning collection of linked stories. The characters in Fools span generations and continents, but are linked by the glow of their ideals, whether obsessive and dangerous or positive and world-changing. We asked Silber a few questions about her writing process and the inspiration behind the new book.

You have written linked stories before. What is it about multiple stories dealing with a single theme and overlapping characters that appeals to you? 
It began two books ago, with Ideas of Heaven, and I love this form. It lets me come in very close to a character and then move on to a different angle.  It seems to give a larger canvas (something I always wanted when I was a novelist).   

Is there a story that you wrote first that led to the others, or do you map all the connections out at the beginning? 
The first story was "Fools," about a young woman who's an anarchist in the 1920s. I saw that I was interested in how people live for ideas—and can they live without them?—and this helped me come up with other stories. One of my favorite characters is Louise, daughter of politically principled parents who feels she can hold "two opinions" at once, even about marriage. I have to say I didn't have a plan for the book and the connections were formed from my own obsessions (like: How does money fit in?) and a curiosity about how certain characters turned out. I was especially happy when I found a way to revisit Liliane, who's a conniving young woman in Paris in one story and an elegant older woman in New York in another. 

Some of these stories refer to very specific political situations in the 1920s, the 1950s and the present. What similarities do you see among these times? 
What an interesting question. The stories do use our country's fear of political radicals—in the '20s  the Sacco-Vanzetti case and in the 1950s the "blacklisting" of suspected communists—and later the post-9/11 fear of Muslims. I didn't call up these parallels on purpose, but my characters naturally encounter these spells of public panic. As it happened, in the last stages of writing the book, Occupy Wall Street was in the news, with an analysis of capitalism not very different from that of the anarchists I began with.

I think longing is a component of being human. It controls our relation to time—we're always watching to see if we'll get what we want.

What kind of research did you do for these stories? 
I read the writings of Dorothy Day and some biographies of her. I read oral histories of old anarchists and of pacifists against World War II. I had a friend tell me about neighborhoods in Paris in the early 1960s. I read biographies of Gandhi. I got a student in a summer program to tell me about growing up in Okinawa. I read about Sufism, since I was traveling to Turkey anyway. And I kept looking up things online—how much money did Madoff steal? what was that beach I went to in Mumbai?  I would gladly dawdle the day away doing research—and finding great details helps me invent.

In "The Hanging Fruit" and "Two Opinions," you create the span of almost an entire life in a single story. What kinds of challenges does that pose? 
It was a great discovery for me that short stories could contain long time spans. The challenge is: Summarized action can be very washy to read. But I think it can be written so it's like a series of mini-scenes. The prose can be concrete and striking.  And I like to show how change accrues gradually.  

There is a real intimacy created between the reader and your first-person narrators. What does that point of view add to the storytelling? 
I'm interested in what characters say to themselves, what they make of what they've done; I think of first-person narration as translating thoughts (as opposed to mimicking speech). I'm especially attached to those moments when a narrator makes a sweeping self-description. That said, I did experiment in this book with stories in third-person ("Better" and "Buying and Selling") and found I could get the same effects.

Your characters all long for something—political, spiritual, sexual—sometimes a combination of the three! How do you think that longing informs our lives? 
In real life, I'm a relatively contented person, but I think longing is a component of being human. It controls our relation to time—we're always watching to see if we'll get what we want. In my plots, characters don't always know what they want at first—they often have an inaccurate idea of what they long for.   

Who are some of your favorite writers and what makes them special to you?
My biggest influences are Chekhov and Alice Munro—Chekhov for the way he can shift our sympathies toward a character who has seemed for most of the story not to deserve them, and Munro for her use of long time spans and for the uncommon length of her stories, whose shapes we often don't see till the end. Both writers show us what we didn't know by shifting the perspective of the story. I'm also a fan of David Malouf and Colm Toibin. And I just belatedly discovered Pat Barker.]

What are you reading now?
I'm glad you asked—I'm totally immersed in Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. I don't even know why it's so good.  It's chock full of truly shocking bits of history—eye-opening in a very substantial way—and has a character who learns everything from the bottom up and can't be outsmarted, on a colossal scale.

RELATED IN BOOKPAGE:
Read our review of Fools.

'Tis the season for spooky reads! As the days in October get a little colder and the nights get a little longer, it's the perfect time to curl up with best-selling author Audrey Niffenegger's new and lovingly curated collection of ghost stories, Ghostly. Featuring Niffenegger's original illustrations and a few of her own stories alongside classics (Poe's "The Black Cat")  and newer works by Neil Gaiman and Kelly Link, readers are sure to find something that moves and quietly haunts them in this book. 

We asked Niffenegger a few questions about her creative process for Ghostly, her favorite scary story, her next project and more.

Which story in this collection scares you the most?
None of them scare me. Some of them make me sad, some of them are extremely beautiful, all of them are surprising and strange. None of them make me want to go to bed with the lights on. This isn’t a book of horror stories.

Can you tell us a bit about your artistic process for the illustrations in Ghostly?
Read the story a few times, wander away to answer email, drink some coffee, read the story again, forget about it for a couple of weeks while attending to more urgent deadlines. Have an idea about the image while washing dishes. Make a sketch, realize that I need a picture reference. Get lost in Google Images for a while. Draw the image. Give the drawing to Ken Gerleve, my assistant, who does helpful things to it on the computer. Send resulting scans to Suzanne Dean who incorporates the image into the design of the book.

The book design (cover art, typography, illustrations) was a collaboration between Suzanne Dean and me. Before any illustrations were made, we discussed ideas for the design and once the stories were chosen we sent designs and images back and forth. Suzanne is wonderful to work with, it was a pleasure to see my images transformed into the book.

Do you think what scares us has changed over time?
Probably not. I’m sure most of it is hard wired into our brains: fear of death, fire, heights, snakes, public speaking, etc. The trick is to find things that are not all that scary, mix them with the horrible things and refine it all into a good story that is haunting.

Do you believe in ghosts?
Nope.

Have you ever been inside a haunted house?
Sorry, no.

Was there a piece of fiction you wanted to include in Ghostly, but couldn’t quite fit?
Beloved, by Toni Morrison.

What are the most fun and the most challenging parts of writing a spooky piece of fiction like “Secret Life, with Cats” or your previous novel, Her Fearful Symmetry?
I am not especially interested in frightening people. I’m more attracted to loss, guilt, grief, longing and solitude. So both “Secret Life, With Cats” and Her Fearful Symmetry are about lonely people trying to regain what they have lost or, failing that, trying to move on. The fun bits involve thinking up special effects. The hard part is making the things that are important to the characters become important to the readers.

What is your favorite scary story?
The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James.

Do you have a favorite Halloween tradition?
When I taught etching I used to read “The Mezzotint” by M.R. James to my students on Halloween.

Why do you think ghost stories, specifically many of these domestically-focused stories in Ghostly, are so enduring and popular?
There’s something wonderful about the intersection of the ordinary and the impossible. These stories are like rollercoasters, controlled thrills. We love to be scared, but not too much.

What are you working on next?
I’m working on a sequel to The Time Traveler’s Wife. It’s called The Other Husband. It is about Alba DeTamble as a grownup.