Jess Row has spent his career testing the limits of what fiction can do. His stories delight in pulling the rug out from under both characters and readers, often collapsing the distance between the two, until we’re left wondering not only where a story is headed but whether the rules of storytelling ever existed in the first place. A master of metafiction, Row doesn’t reach for traditional, hyper-conscious narrative tricks like Dave Eggers or David Foster Wallace. Instead, he turns fiction back on itself, using narrative to expose the hidden assumptions and contradictions embedded in the stories we tell about ourselves and others. Reading his work often feels like standing on a frozen lake that’s beginning to crack beneath your feet—disorienting, thrilling, and impossible to forget.
That same restless, experimental energy pulses throughout Storyknife—Row’s third collection and first in fifteen years. Across fourteen inventive, incisive, and darkly funny stories, he dissects white America while exposing the hidden politics embedded in narrative itself. Echoing the Javier Marías epigraph that opens the collection—which calls storytelling a bond, one that can become so knotted and entangled that a knife is needed to cut it—Storyknife asks what stories conceal as much as what they reveal. Each story in this collection cuts beneath the surface, inviting readers to question not only the realities they inhabit but the narratives they rely on to make sense of them.
I spoke with Row about metafiction, Buddhism, and the wildness of short stories over Zoom.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Rumpus: Storyknife brings together stories written over a period of almost two decades. At what point did you realize that these stories belonged together, and what emerged when you saw them in conversation with one another?
Jess Row: From the beginning, I knew I wanted to write a book of metafiction. I wanted to write stories that had this experimental, self-referential, conceptual element, but I didn’t want to write metafiction like anyone else I knew. I didn’t want to write classic Borges-style metafiction, because that was done a long time ago. I also didn’t want to write like Dave Eggers, David Foster Wallace, or Gen X POMO metafiction. Not because I didn’t like that stuff—a lot of it I really loved—but because I wanted to do something very different. Something more explicitly political, more deeply experimental in the sense of using metafiction, not just as a clever way of reminding the reader that they’re reading a construct, but metafiction that really digs into how we incorporate stories into our lives—how stories live among us, shape our lives, histories, and economies in unexpected ways. I wanted each story to be different in some way and to have an emotional punch.
Rumpus: The stories often blur the boundary between the narrator and the reader, directly addressing us in ways that feel intimate and unsettling. In particular, “Dear Yale” and “The Axe” ask the readers to participate in completing the story, or even proving the narrator’s existence. What interests you about collapsing the distance between the writer, the narrator, and the reader?
Row: In both cases, the narrator is asking the reader to validate something that shouldn’t be validated. “Dear Yale” is about an eighty-something, WASP-y, country-club-Connecticut Yale alum from decades ago, who was kicked off the interviewer’s committee for doing suspect stuff, like sexually harassing young women who came to him for alumni interviews. He’s this very addled, eccentric person, who had an even more eccentric father, who was also a major donor to Yale. It’s a story about a really creepy person—almost Nabokov-level creepy—who has all these weird theories about Yale, Jews, money, sex, and diversity. He’s really excited about how Yale is no longer just a white place, but now a very diverse place, because he wants to have all these young kids have sex with one another and have multiracial families, so that capital and money can flow through them, which is a kind of satire of what actually happens at elite universities. I wanted to sort of foreground that through this Humbert Humbert figure.
“The Axe” is more complicated. It’s about this struggling classical musician in New York in the ’90s, who’s tutoring the gay teenage son of this very wealthy single mom in this brownstone in the West Village. He’s twenty-five and the teenager is seventeen, and they start having a sexual relationship. In the ’90s that would still have been a big deal, but not in the way it would be today. The story is kind of moral and the authorial view is kind of morally equivocal. The characters themselves, who are looking back on this thirty years later, are also kind of morally equivocal.
In both cases the experimental component has to do with threatening the stability of the distance norm between the narrator and the reader.
Rumpus: What does Storyknife mean to you as a title? How does it reflect what the collection is trying to accomplish?
Row: There was a very short-lived band called Senator Flux out of the punk rock scene who had an album called Storyknife. They released two albums, then totally disappeared. Their music has never been re-released on streaming. But I loved them, and I loved that title. I was thinking about metafiction, and the Kafka quote: “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.” I was teaching at the MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and people in the program, especially the poets, were doing a lot of what they called “writing off the page.” They weren’t smudging sage, but they were doing different rituals like lighting candles or putting little rocks around the reading space, things to make the readings not so boring and one-dimensional. The first time I read “The Axe,” I brought a small axe up on stage. I didn’t want it to be a machete. I thought that would be too weird. For some reason, I thought an axe would be less weird. I held up the axe near the end of the story when it says, “A machete is the opposite of mildness. Where there is mildness… There is unlikely to be a machete present. Try it. Bring a machete to your local tapas bar, your local artisanal bakery, and see what kind of response you get.” I was really interested in metaphors of cutting, incision, and incisiveness, sort of like cutting through the bullshit.
Then I found the epigraph from Javier Marías, from Your Face Tomorrow, that perfectly encapsulated what I was trying to say. It’s early in the novel, and it jumped out at me. I knew it was the epigraph. Marías wrote: “Telling is almost always done as a gift, even when the story contains and injects some poison, it is also a bond… rare is the close bond that does not grow twisted or knotted and, in the end, become so entangled that a razor or knife is needed to cut it.” I loved that.
Rumpus: The stories in this collection often end with unforgettable images. At the end of the opening story, “Justify Your Existence,” the narrator is splayed across this cracked, frozen lake, trying to save a former student from drowning. Do your stories usually start with images, or is that something you work towards as you write?
Row: Usually they come up at the end. I write short stories in this turtle-like way, where I write the beginning and then move very slowly through the whole thing. I write a scene, then I go back and work on the scene. When I’m satisfied, I write the next scene. It’s this cumulative process. I don’t revise very much during, and I don’t really write multiple drafts. I write one draft, and then, to me, the story is basically done. I often have no idea what’s gonna happen at the end of the story, until I get quite a ways into the story. That was definitely the case with “Justify Your Existence.” Every turn that story took surprised me.
In “The Assasination of Henry Kissinger,” I knew from the beginning that it was about the assassination of Henry Kissinger, but I didn’t know who was going to open that front door until fairly late in the scene. I’m not going to spoil it for the reader, but something very unexpected happens. Part of the process is understanding the general course of how the scene is going to go, but exactly what that means often isn’t clarified til the last minute. It’s like Grace Paley’s title, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. That’s the special art, the wildness, of the short story.
Rumpus: I read the ending of “Take the Child” twice to process what actually happened. Why did you want to write that story? What was the process like, and how did you end up there?
Row: I wrote that story in the late 2000s when we were raising a toddler. Like many first-time parents, we were really afraid of postpartum depression. We knew people who’d had it, people who’d really suffered from it.
I knew that this was a young woman, a former writer, who’d gone to an MFA program and was living in Princeton. She’d been abandoned by her weird, eccentric, asshole husband and had this very small baby. She was having an extreme postpartum psychosis experience where her baby was speaking to her telepathically in an adult voice. That’s where I started. I definitely didn’t know how the story was going to end until I wrote the ending. I knew she was moving around Princeton, having these imaginary, disembodied, telepathic conversations with her baby.
She’s in the children’s section of the one bookstore in Princeton, reading Goodnight Moon. If you’ve ever read Goodnight Moon, you know the thing about it is that the pages get darker because the baby is looking at the book and is supposed to get sleepier. That book is amazing—the woman who wrote it was a genius, Margaret Wise Brown—and a great example of a literal use of the materials to intrude on the reader’s space. The reader in this case is a baby. At that point, the book is going dark, the world is going dark, and I had this image of the mom going dark at this moment. And then, thank goodness she doesn’t—you know—but she gets this close.
Rumpus: Throughout the collection, characters repeatedly question if anything is real, meaningful, or lasting. At the same time, the stories feel deeply invested in storytelling itself. How do you reconcile those impulses? Why do stories matter to you?
Row: I’ve been a practicing Zen Buddhist my whole adult life, since I was nineteen. The Mahayana Buddhist view of reality is that reality is a construction, a conditioned phenomenon. It’s not what it appears. The everyday experience we have is called the conventional plane. Buddhism doesn’t devalue the conventional plane, it just says the state of reality is that the conventional plane is not what it seems. The conditioned nature of the world means that when we write stories, we’re essentially writing dreams about dreams. That’s why in traditional East Asian literature there’s all this focus on dreams and dream states. That’s what a story is. It’s this double conditionality, the conditioned construct of a conditioned construct. If you’re a Buddhist practitioner, that meta sense is built into how you create art because you’re aware of its impermanence. None of the stories in Storyknife have Buddhist themes. But in some of my other fiction, like in my first book, The Train to Lo Wu (The Dial Press, 2007), and in my last novel, The New Earth (Ecco, 2024), there’s a lot of material about Buddhism.
One of my approaches to metafiction that I think is quite distinct from the tradition of the postmodern metafictionists like John Barth, Borges, or David Foster Wallace is that those are relentlessly secular writers. Metafictional writers are mostly very brainy, neurotic, and irreverent genius personalities. There’s no sense of the sacred, religious wisdom tradition behind it. But I approach metafiction as a kind of religious art in the sense that my attitude toward the short story is a bit like Flannery O’Connor’s. All of her short stories were captured within her particular, eccentric, Catholic worldview—all the iconography, and her interest in the anagogical. She always talked about how there was the worldly plane, the plane of the saints, and the plane of heaven. She always was trying to have those planes intersect with one another. My worldview is so different, but I’m trying to do something similar.
Rumpus: “Young Adult,” was originally published in Granta under the title “Radical Sufficiency.” The story was first published in 2018, but it feels even more relevant today. Where did the idea for this story come from and what questions were you hoping it would raise about technology, ambition, and identity?
Row: My wife and I had close friends living in South Orange, New Jersey at the time. Our kids were still in elementary school and we were very close with our friends’ kids. One time we were in South Orange, and there was a robotics competition at a high school. I’d never seen a robotics competition before, so I had no idea what they were like. It was fascinating.
The perverse and satirical side of my brain clicked in, and I wondered: “What if these teenagers weren’t satisfied with having their robots just go up ramps and lift stuff? What if they were attaching dildos to the robots and making them have sex with each other?” In the story, the teenagers are doing robot-on-robot porn, putting it up online and monetizing it. This was almost ten years ago, before OnlyFans. So, that was the inspiration. I thought: “This is a really offensive and horrible story, that’s why it’s so funny and I’m gonna write it!”
The other component of the story is a lot of nostalgia for me, growing up in a hyper-competitive house, in a hyper-competitive school, full of kids who were under tons of pressure from their parents, and in a socioeconomic environment where that was normalized. Nostalgia about people I knew in high school, relationships I had in high school. There’s a love triangle with a John Hughes element to it, a sort of Pretty in Pink or Some Kind of Wonderful situation going on.
Rumpus: In “The Assassination of Henry Kissinger” one character says: “Writing short stories is an affront to the whole idea of time. People should be paid not to write them.” As someone who’s written both novels and short fiction, how serious is that sentiment, and what does each form allow you to do that the other can’t?
Row: It’s a very serious sentiment. People in publishing say to me all the time: “We don’t want short stories. We can’t sell short stories.” It’s like farmers who produce surplus crops are paid by the government to either not farm or sell their crops to the government. They’re valueless commodities because of the larger economic system. IKEA used to fill their showrooms with real books bought by the yard in shipping containers. When we had little kids and were buying a lot of crappy furniture from IKEA, I’d routinely shop the bookshelves and just take the books with me. Nobody cared. I got a first edition of Ann Beattie’s selected short stories—first edition, perfect, mint condition—in IKEA, for nothing.
My first love as a writer is short stories. It’s always been my first loyalty. My first meaningful fiction teacher was a professor at Ohio State named Lee K. Abbott. He was this big alpha guy who played golf, who came out of that Sausage Fest era of late ’70s postmodernism, like an ’80s Barry Hannah or real macho Donald Barthelme. We couldn’t have been more different, but he was an amazing teacher. He only wrote short stories, and he only cared about teaching short stories. I took a first class with him when I was seventeen. I wasn’t even in college yet. He was very exacting, he knew what a good short story was, and he was really hard on me. So, I had this real cathexis, this real emotional bond with the short story. It’s how I learned to write fiction.
By the time I got to graduate school, I had written a lot of short stories. When I got out of grad school, I had this first book, which had already won awards and was in the Best American Short Stories. I thought: “I’m so good at writing short stories, how hard can a novel be?” Lorrie Moore writes a novel every now and then for the bank account, but the real art of Lorrie Moore is, of course, in the short stories. I thought I could just write a novel. I tried that and completely failed. It was only then that I realized that I had studied nothing about the novel as a concept, or how to write a novel in graduate school. I’d only studied short stories.
Rumpus: In the last story in the collection, “The Empties,” the characters debate whether the time they live in is dystopian or post-apocalyptic. One character says that narratives are always constructed after the fact, and none of the old endings played out, so we have to imagine new endings. It feels like the perfect ending to the collection. What do you hope readers take from that idea, both about storytelling and about the possibilities for hope?
Row: I’ve spent every summer in Vermont for twenty years. Vermont is a very self-sufficient economy, and Vermonters are somewhat used to living off the land. I thought that Vermonters would be ideally suited for a post-apocalyptic world, so I wrote it to be kind of a gentle satire of Vermont. I love it here, but Vermont is also eccentric and weird and a little oblivious to the rest of the world. Its virtuousness is a little bit within a bubble of liberal whiteness.
“The Empties” was written during the Obama years, around the time that the movie Beasts of the Southern Wild, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven came out. I was playing with post-apocalyptic, narrative, science fiction writing. When I was revising “The Empties” for the collection, the story felt so different for me. When I first wrote it, I was working with fictional tropes about post-apocalyptic governments, and it felt totally fictive. In 2026, not fictive at all. There’s a certain dovetailing with “The Assasination of Henry Kissinger” and “The Empties,” which was totally unplanned. Both stories are about people taking up arms. This is something that is part of my literary, artistic subconscious, but it’s also part of my politics.
I think that what’s so disconcerting about “The Empties” is that it’s a story that feels so real and palpable and possible. That’s why I wanted it at the end of the book. There’s a lot of debate in the story about if we still live in history, or in a time that deserves to be recorded. Within me, there’s this sense of, is American history over? And if it is, then does it really matter?
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