Right. So, it's now eight years. I've many, many notebooks, but what I see when I examine the notebooks now are phases of development toward the work I'm doing at present. I see it in embryonic stages early on, and I begin to see what I thought were simply notes, because they didn't resemble my earlier work, were, actually in early form, the work that I have now begun to do … the new work, in other words. I didn't recognize it at first. I thought it was failed old work.

The Forest of the South is not a haphazard collection of stories but a carefully arranged exhibit of work by a serious artist in prose. Its first virtue is an almost ponderable integrity. For a book of seventeen short pieces unlinked by plot or character it gives a remarkable impression of completeness. It seems to say, abundantly and...