Kim Fu, "For John"

It’s December 6. Kim Fu, author of Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, is building up an impressive collection of landscapes.

How would you describe your story?

KIM FU: A long, obsessive relationship between a man and a painting.

When did you write it, and how did the writing process compare to your other work?

KF: I wrote the first draft of this story in 2022. It came together unusually quickly, at a time when I was primarily focused on a different, longer project, and I wasn’t sure if it was any good. It sat in the proverbial drawer—that is, more or less forgotten on my hard drive—until late 2023, when I was teaching at the Tin House autumn workshop and needed something for the faculty reading, and I was tired of reading from my latest book. I found the story again, and I was surprised by how well it worked aloud, the reactions it got from the audience, the ending in particular. Oh, I thought, there’s something here.

What kind of research went into this story?

KF: If we consider life research: At an art fair with a group of friends, I joked about us buying a painting together, discovering it was worth a lot of money, and then beginning to murder one another, each wanting to be the last one alive and the sole owner of the painting. (This is what it’s like to be friends with a writer.) As tends to happen, that idea morphed into a different one, which became a different one, which became a different one, until all that remained was a story about a painting.

What, to you, makes the short story a special form? What can it do that other kinds of writing can’t?

KF: The wonder of the short story is that they are short. You can fully inhabit a character and their lifetime of experiences in the time it takes you to eat lunch or commute to work on the bus. I love how much must be left off the page, implied, unsaid—how much weight each word has when you can only have so many of them. The novel is a generous, wandering, capacious form; the short story is a tight, demanding little container, where everything must fit just so.

Where should people go to learn more about you and your work?

KF: My website, kim-fu.com.

What’s the best gift you’ve ever been given?

KF: A PlayStation in 1999.

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