Englander: Imagine Without End

If you've never read the short stories of Nathan Englander's short stories, especially his first collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, then he's worth your reading time. He writes about the Jewish community--orthodox, ultra-orthodox, Reformed, and secular--in a way that reminds me of our own Pentecostal movement.

Recently, he had a new story published in The New Yorker, which meant he was interviewed for their Book Bench blog. Per usual, he had some solid advice for writers everywhere:


But you’re asking if it was liberating to work with very limited elements, and the answer is: Wildly so. Everything is so much clearer once a world is framed. Maybe it sounds crazy, but with writing it’s infinity that is limiting, and the limited that allows for the truly infinite. Once all those elements are in place in a story, the brain is truly freed up to imagine without end.