![]() ![]() ![]() Why Did I Ever is divided into 536 very short chapters, and Robison uses a similar structure in her latest novel, One D.O.A., One On the Way: it has 225 very small sections, divided into nine chapters. We can attest that occasionally the words do stop flowing, and it’s scary, but in retrospect it’s hard to call Robison’s experience a “block.” She did write, on index cards, and those cards became the novel Why Did I Ever, which won the LA Times Book Prize for fiction in 2001. This was followed by two more collections, two novels, and then, in the ’90s, a bout of writer’s block. ![]() She prefers “subtractionist,” according to a 2001 interview in Bomb Magazine, because “that at least implied a little effort.” After publishing short stories in several magazines, including The New Yorker, back when magazines other than The New Yorker still published short fiction, she published her first story collection, An Amatuer’s Guide to the Night, in 1983. Mary Robison is widely considered to be a charter member of the canon of literary minimalists. ![]()
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