SOURCE: Birkerts, Sven. “Ethan Canin/Mona Simpson/Brett Easton Ellis/Jill Eisenstadt.” In American Energies, pp. 374-79. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1992.

In the following excerpt, Birkerts delineates the defining characteristics of the stories in Canin's short story collection Emperor of the Air.

According to a recent profile in Publishers Weekly, twenty-seven-year-old Ethan Canin has published every story he's written since the age of nineteen—most of them in prestigious journals like Esquire, Atlantic, and Ploughshares. Yet his debut volume, Emperor of the Air, contains only nine stories. Either Canin refused to republish everything he's written, or else he works very slowly.

I prefer the latter explanation, for it supports my sense that each separate work is an occasion, a rare and happy collaboration between craft and emotional imperative. Perspiration and inspiration, you might say, only not in the drab Protestant proportions of 99/1. These plums have...