I first came to know Miles Klee when I published him in my anthology, Watchlist: 32 Stories by Persons of Interest (a beautiful brand new edition of which is out this May from Catapult with preorders available here). John Oakes, our mutual publisher and cofounder of OR Books, raved about Miles’s work and told me that I should check him out. After I emailed him, Miles sent me three incredibly different and wildly satisfying stories, each riffing on Watchlist’s surveillance theme. In one, Pythagoras achieves godlike omnipotence but is cursed with crippling impotence; he can see everything but can’t change a thing. In another a man is watched by a commercial, a triceratops meets an alien, and a gang of partiers has one last good time before they’re rounded up and presumably killed by the police. The third story, “Drone,” begins: “The president’s coma took a turn for the worse: she was dead.” It only gets better, and crazier, from there.

That’s the one I chose to put in the anthology. It’s a dystopian thriller, full of linguistic and literal fireworks, and fit perfectly in my book but only because there was a weird-, sci fi-, dystopian- shaped hole that I wanted to fill. The other stories, “Pythagoras Too” and “Sonata,” are equally hyperkinetic and mind-blowing and were included in Miles’ new story collection True False, out from OR Books. True False is encyclopedic in scope and infinite in pleasure. Its forty-four stories are knife-sharp, funny, insightful, and ultimately devastating meditations on the human condition. They also display Miles’s profound intelligence and deep empathy. The more I read them, the more I wanted to get to know the author himself.

But Miles and I both had a busy 2015. A month after his story collection came out, my own debut collection, Everyone Wants to Be Ambassador to France, was published by Starcherone Books. When we were finally able to catch up we were both on the road. I was in Portland about to participate in the inaugural and wonderful Wordstock festival. Miles was in San Francisco, on a business trip for his day job at the Daily Dot. We talked on G-chat. Miles is as quick and funny and intelligent as his stories suggest. I was sitting at a desk in my hotel room, staring out my window at (and feeling as smart as) a brick wall.  

 

BRYAN

Hi Miles. Thanks for chatting about our new books. To get things started I thought I’d ask you a series of binary questions in the spirit of your book’s title, True False. Don’t worry, there are no wrong answers. Ready?

 

MILES

Hit me.

 

BRYAN

Cats or dogs?

 

MILES

Dogs.

 

BRYAN

Mountains or ocean?

 

MILES

Ocean. Dogs by the ocean, for sure.

 

BRYAN

Christmas or Fourth of July?

 

MILES

Fourth of July, preferably by the ocean—though I feel bad about how scared dogs are by fireworks.

 

BRYAN

Yeah fireworks are really scary for dogs. Last one: Bacon or cancer?

 

MILES

Bacon. Feed some leftover crumbs to the dogs. Live always in absolute denial of cancer.

 

BRYAN

Okay good. I lied about there being no wrong answers, but you got most of the questions right. Mountains are better than ocean.  

 

MILES

What are you, my dad? For a guy who’s so into outer space, I figured the terrifying limitlessness of the sea would hold some appeal.

 

BRYAN

I don’t know. Is your dad also scared of all the deep sea creatures that would chomp him in half? “Terrifying limitlessness” is terrifying. What’s worse is that I wear glasses and have to take them off when I go in the water. I can’t see anything.

 

MILES

A lot of your characters are terrified. In some ways it’s even more bracing when they’re not—because they should be. I feel like our man in “Vicissitudes, CA” is on the edge of oblivion and sorta chill about it. (The story has both mountains and ocean, too. Nice.)

 

BRYAN

Like our dude in “Vicissitudes” I lived in L.A. for a long time and I think that you give a pretty good description. If it wasn’t burning, it was shaking, and if it wasn’t shaking, it was drying up. Everyone’s on the edge of oblivion all the time, but are super chill about it.

 

MILES

I’m in San Francisco right now and sitting like 20 yards from a tsunami zone sign. California is ideal for doomsday cults.

 

BRYAN

I’m traveling too. I’m in Portland right now. Talk about doomsday. Did you read that New Yorker story? The reason why I was never a very good Californian is because I’m not super chill about most things. I’m anxious and tend to get worked up. In fact, I had the pleasure of reading your book while I was on the plane from New York, hurtling 32,000 feet above the ground, rattling around in the metal tube, and super aware of my own mortality. It was intense—a great way to read the book and also, probably, the most terrible…

 

MILES

And if your butt falls asleep—worst of all possible worlds.

 

BRYAN

…Because your characters spend like all of their time talking and thinking about death, the fragile thing that is life, and how close we all are to slipping this mortal coil. Why did you want to make me feel worse about flying than I was already feeling?

 

MILES

Because I could. But look who’s talking, man! Practically speaking, death is the end of all your problems. You write about people who have to keep being alive. Your astronaut has to sleepwalk through an earthly existence for decades after walking on the moon. Tycho Brahe has to go on without a nose. In “Heavens,” we’re denied the finality of demise—the afterlives just keep coming. Taking a permanent break from consciousness would be a lot less scary.

 

BRYAN

When you put it that way. But the examples from my work that you’re pointing to are big and bright, cartoonish ways that people can get maimed by living. When I’m writing I like to make problems big and simple so that maybe even I can understand them. Your stories are way subtler. Your characters seem to have been damaged by having been born. The garbage men who are the last two American English speakers in “Dead Languages,” the dauphin with the incurable itch in “The Dauphin,” the insomniac shark in “Great White.” Everyone’s walking around shell-shocked and scarred by stuff that’s happened before the story has even started.  

 

MILES

My wife Cece and I are fans of saying that “nobody asked to be born.” It’s hard to escape the violence of your own creation.

 

BRYAN

And yet here we are. Because I am not yet a complete cynic, I wonder what can be done about this. If not “this” in life, then “this” in fiction. What are your characters seeking?

 

MILES

They, like me, want to understand their own particular idiocy. It’s the problem of the brain trying to apprehend itself—you touch on it in “My Other Car Drives Itself,” when the Google dudes are trying to parse what makes our minds react in specific ways, and why, and whether there’s some evolutionary advantage to it. You’re like, OK, human cognition does this—should that be the baseline reality, or should we be rejecting or revising the way that we think?

 

BRYAN

Here I thought I was just writing about self-driving cars. I feel bad for the guy in that story because he lives on autopilot. He is a self-driving car. He doesn’t make any decisions and when he does—like deciding to have a kid—he denies that he actually made. And he’s dating a woman, not his wife, who’s studying poetry, but this guy can’t understand why she does it. “Poetry’s not fun,” he says. “It’s not entertainment.” He’s disconnected, and in that case from the pleasure of language itself. I noticed that in some of your stories, “XX,” “Dead Languages,” words are the worst things to lose, the biggest loss that we can suffer.

 

MILES

It sure would be tough without them. Though maybe also liberating? We’d start talking in little dances, like bees. Autopilot is exactly it. Or, as I have it in “The Milkman’s Exhaustion,” the feeling that you watch yourself do things.

 

BRYAN

That poor milkman! He’s been worn down by an excess of people, no? Too much fucking. It’s so much that he can’t even see people as people. They’re things, part of the landscape. He looks at the trees and bees and says, “Oh great the trees are fucking.”   

 

MILES

Yeah, a punishing accumulation of detail—not emotion—is what’s gonna kill him.

 

BRYAN

But he is so emotional, so sensitive. He’s like my favorite X-Men character, Mr. Sensitive, whose mutant superpower was having an excess of feeling.

 

MILES

I’m almost always writing about people who are oversensitive to the world. It could be because my particular narcissistic paranoia makes me sometimes believe that more than half the people walking around on this planet are not actually awake to their senses, or at least not so often crippled by them as artists are. It’s as if the creative class is made up of individuals doomed to analyze their response to any and every object. Everyone else just has their response.

 

BRYAN

I wouldn’t call it paranoia. Even if we aren’t sleeping now, there are so many things designed to put us to sleep. Whenever I’m in an uncomfortable social situation—let’s say most of them—it’s so easy to pull out my phone and turn to Twitter or whatever, because I know that no one there is going to threaten me. Or if they are going to threaten me it’s in a very controlled way, and I can analyze my reactions before I, you know, react. So there. In that sense you’ve convinced me. Self-consciousness is terrible and crippling. But it’s also a source of so much richness and celebration. I’m thinking of your story “Ibid.,” which is a wonderful garden maze through your own head and your life as a reader and writer.

 

MILES

And your “Honeymoon” is a perfect counterpoint—you’re following this couple, getting so tied up in their micro-dramas, that it’s incredibly jarring to switch perspectives and see that this guy, Laurent, who works at the hotel where they stayed, also has his inner life, one that extends back before and well beyond their stay. Oh shit, that guy is also real. Everyone is real. Shit.  

 

BRYAN

There you have it. We’ve resurrected the rich inner life of humanity, and almost as fast as we killed it. I really like this because I’m sort of an optimist. Or I want to be. I’d like to believe that everyone is as terrified and paralyzed by their own inner shit as I am. But can I swing back to “Ibid.” real fast? What I really love about it is the way that you’re patting me on the head for sometimes being as smart as you are. There’s a real thrill in seeing that we read the same books and like the same sentences. That Barthelme story, for example, “Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby,” is one of my favorites, and I think not as widely loved as it should be. But at the same time, you sort of outpace me. By the time I was done with the story I was like, “Woah. Miles has read at least 85 books.” I don’t know if I can really say the same.

 

MILES

The fun part is that I still haven’t read some of them. I flipped pages and skimmed a few. So it becomes one of those deadly pretentious cocktail party games where you and another intellectual are sizing each other up. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a dude more disappointed than the one who asked me if I’d read Infinite Jest when I said I had. Completely robbed him of the opportunity to explain it to me.

 

BRYAN

Send him my way. That was another one of those books that I began on an airplane. I think I got about 30 minutes in when I realized it was a really bad idea. But I know exactly what you’re talking about. I’m an academic by profession. I live at those cocktail parties. Still there’s a lot of fun to be had in both faking expertise and in being an expert. That brings me to the range in your storytelling. In True False we have forty-four stories. And in them you try everything—every style, every genre. In every story you’re showing us that we all inner lives, we’re all self-conscious, which isn’t to diminish the hugeness of your project. We call that the scope of literature. But I wonder about your range, your elasticity. Why try so many different ways of telling?

 

MILES

A limited attention span helps. There’s a reason why you’ve got a Jim Shepardesque bibliography at the end of your book and I don’t—no patience for research. If I have an idea, I want to let it rip, facts be damned. The variety is because every couple of weeks I discover some new writer or subset of fiction that knocks me flat, and I want to immediately steal the voice. I’m not sure if I’m elastic or cursed by a kind of obsessive mimicry.

 

BRYAN

It’s funny/not-funny that you bring up Jim Shepard, since he taught us both. With that Arctic Explorers story I decided that I wanted to try to out-Shepard Shepard. He writes so incredibly about single historical tragedies. What if I tried to write about a bunch of tragedies all at once?

 

MILES

As he would say: “That’s not going to end well.” But it’s a great approach. The multiplicity of a single failure. And it’s funny that you say you’re trying to outdo another writer, because each successive explorer has to believe the guy before him just wasn’t as good.

 

BRYAN

I could never outdo. More like how can I productively misread to make room for my own lesser writing?

 

MILES

Living the dream.

 

BRYAN

I’m interested for more of your take on this multiplicity of a single failure idea. Like the way you riff of single themes. “24 Sorts of Silence” is an example.

 

MILES

Probably one of the best things about literature is the way it can collapse the spectrum of human experience into a painfully small example. Not to be the basic bro who brings up Salinger, but the very last line of “Just Before the War with the Eskimos” (I had to look it up, because I remember the moment way better than the story itself): “A few years before, it had taken her three days to dispose of the Easter chick she had found dead on the sawdust in the bottom of her wastebasket.” That never happened to me, but the image somehow correlates to a hundred events in my own life—I just can’t shake the feel of the thing. In those list-like stories of mine, I’m collecting fragments of life that do not look but perhaps mean the same.      

 

BRYAN

If you can be a Salinger bro, then I’ll be a Flannery O’Connor one. In Mystery and Manners she talks about stories operating vertically, moving off the horizontal axis of plot and becoming something more akin to poetry. I’m curious, since we’re talking about list-like stories which might operate outside of the paradigm of Freytag’s triangle (and let’s face it: I’ve written a few), do you read much poetry?  

 

MILES

I have an insanely narrow interest in poetry. I read Kay Ryan almost exclusively. Those poems are such perfectly compacted mindfucks. And then there’s that great flash fiction that feels more like poetry anyway—the Diane Williams story in the latest issue of PANK, for example. But I still need to broaden my poetry intake. I saw this poetry reading in Boston during a conference and it was incredible, the poems were all quicksilver and funny and strange and often delivered from memory, with mesmerizing authority, and I got too drunk and forgot everyone’s name, which was heartbreaking—I wanted to buy all their books. I’m an idiot. It still made me want to write my own poems, but they usually come out dopey. How about you?  

 

BRYAN

I’m pretty much the same. I really like prose writers like Etgar Keret or Amelia Gray, whose stories move really fast and develop their own weird logics and idioms, which in my ignorance I like to call poetic. I buy books of poetry aspirationally but then really only circle back to the same few again and again. James Tate’s “Goodtime Jesus”—which for me is just like, crap I could read that poem forever. Once a few years ago I got the inclination to write a poem. I showed it to my wife, Marri, and she pretty much kicked me out the door.

 

MILES

Holy shit, I love “Goodtime Jesus”! I found it in an anthology in high school and have been stuck to it ever since. I internally recite that kicker—“Hell, I love everybody”—whenever I’m in a good mood. You’re freaking me out a little. What that poem does that I’d like a story of mine to do is walk right into the reader’s head and make itself at home, Kramer-style. There’s no pretense. It acts like it’s your oldest friend. It belongs right there with the rest of your thoughts.     

 

BRYAN

That is the dream. Story as brainworm. I once heard someone talk about stories as pop songs and collections as albums (I think it was Viet Nguyen, but it was a thousand years ago in grad school). I like that idea because I really like pop songs, but I’m also a pretty shitty musician. I like stories that have that can worm their way into your brain and cause you to sing, but I also really like stories that are stories. I don’t know, I guess I’m thinking of the difference between your Donald Barthelmes of the world and your Mary Gaitskills. I can read a Barthelme story and get lines stuck in my head for days. But when I read a Gaitskill story like “The Other Place,” I don’t get any lines stuck in my head, per se, but I feel like my entire head has been hijacked. It’s been chloroformed, thrown in a trunk, tied to a chair, and slapped around for a little while. When the story finally lets me go I’m not buzzing off lines. Instead I’ve been completely altered. I’m forced to look at things a little more closely. I get the same effect off of your story “Quick.”    

 

MILES

“Quick” is so close to home that my mom had to say something about it despite really not wanting to. She was like, “That’s… some story.” I was equally, appropriately rattled by your “Panic Attack.” I wonder if we’re just sadists performing gleeful violence on other people’s minds, and targeting in particular the people closest to us. That’s as unromantic a view of fiction writers as I can muster.   

 

BRYAN

I don’t know if it’s sadistic to perform violence on other people’s minds. I think a good story should knock us on the head and rattle things around a bit. If it’s not doing that, what’s it doing? I don’t want stories to tell me things that I already know. But I also think the violence can be gleeful and full of celebration. It shouldn’t be medicine. I recently had a student write me a note that basically said, “Would you please stop assigning depressing stories. I’m finding it hard to think good things about other human beings.” The note was in reference to Etgar Keret’s story “Not Human Beings,” which to be fair is pretty dark. But it’s also sort of joyous. Shouldn’t fiction writers knock readers on the brain pan and at the same time make them feel exquisite joy?

 

MILES

Oh, you’re right, I’d never advocate for coddling. I just also find it funny that we’re in the game of inflicting psychic pain on people who come asking for it, or that I pick up a book wanting to be devastated—there’s an element of rubber-necking, no? And wanting to be in the accident oneself, per J.G. Ballard? Cece has seen every movie ever made, complete film buff, loves the dark and skin-crawly stuff. But if it’s something new, and there’s a dog in it, she makes me check a website that tells you whether the dog dies in a given movie, because she doesn’t want to see that, can’t see that—well, she’ll tolerate it in a movie she knows to be great, but if she can avoid it, she will. Meanwhile I had a friend complain because he checked my Goodreads account for book recommendations and saw I give everything like five stars. There’s something so uncomfortable about knowing exactly what you want and getting it almost every time.   

 

BRYAN

Thanks for the Goodreads stars! I saw that and it made me feel really good. Like Cece, I’m not a fan of dogs dying in books or movies. I don’t like to consume it and I don’t like to construct it, because there’s enough of that sort of cruelty in real life already. Are there any topics or things that you avoid writing about? For example, I make a pretty conscious effort to avoid guns in my own writing. I’m not saying that I’d never write a gun into a story, or even that I don’t enjoy consuming shoot-’em-up fiction. But I think guns are awful and prevalent enough in real life, so I don’t feel particularly enthused about adding more of them, even if they are just imaginary. I guess that my philosophy is that the fictional world may be awful in a million ways (and it usually is), but the real world is a billion times worse. By quietly excluding maybe I can imagine a world that’s a little better than the one we’ve got. But like I said this rule isn’t hard and fast. Maybe tomorrow I’ll write some slash fic about Wayne LaPierre making love to a semi-automatic rifle.

 

MILES

Man, I always bring out the guns. Part of that is my noir addiction, Hammett and lately Simenon and Pascal Garnier. I ended up wrestling with the impulse a lot in a story I wrote with a collaborator, Madeline Gobbo, that we’re now submitting—it’s about a near-future program where agents secretly abduct and surgically “fix” young men at risk of becoming mass shooters. The thing I avoid writing about, honestly? The Internet. Hey, if people wanna read stories about the texture of online life, OK, but the books I love provide much-needed respite from that. Plus I still find it impossible to render the web interestingly, or in a way that’s not immediately dated.  

 

BRYAN

It’s funny that you’re Internet averse because I associate you so strongly with the Internet. I mean, on one hand because it’s the medium our relationship exists in, except for that one time we met IRL. But on the other because of all the great, funny, and interesting writing you do for the Daily Dot, where so much of what you do is write about the Internet (the DFW troll piece is, I think, still my favorite). I wonder why you can write about the Internet in one context but not in another.

 

MILES

That, I believe, speaks to the strengths of journalism and reportage over fiction. It can be difficult to dramatize what’s funniest as a deadpan statement of fact, which is why, when I heard the story that is the basis of that very short piece “A Little Party,” I basically just said everything I knew about it, via hearsay, in a tidy little paragraph. It’s so much weirder that way! Though maybe I avoid writing Internet-focused narratives so I can shed the rhythms of my job, which always threaten to take over entirely. I didn’t see any stories about teaching in your book, did I?

 

BRYAN

Touche. Maybe what surprises me most about your Internet aversion has something to do with the fact that the Internet is so weird. Go online and you’ll encounter something weird pretty much immediately, and I mean horrible weird, and sad weird, wonderfully beautiful and life-affirming weird. And I get pretty much the same thing from opening up and reading any story in your book. Your book is weird, and I mean that as the highest possible compliment. But how is literary weirdness different from real life or Internet weirdness? For me I’m thinking about moments of transcendent weirdness in fiction, strangeness that cracks me open.

 

MILES

I want to say that literary weirdness—and this may be why your book feels like a comfort to me whereas mine was a point of anxiety for you, but also vice versa—has an intention that real life (and, by extension, the Internet) do not. It’s weird on purpose, not by chance. It weaves a thread through sheer chaos. Cece came up with with this really funny concept of the Big Bang and physics and love and everything where it all boils down to one atom turning to another and going, “Right?” The subtext of every story I’ve written is: “Shit’s pretty fucking weird, right?” So I cherish the stories that—like yours—tell me I’m not entirely crazy. It’s not that you agree with whatever I say and believe. It’s that I can tell we’re fighting the same fight. More of that, please.