This Week in Fiction: Joshua Ferris: The New Yorker Your story in this week's issue, "The Fragments," is about a man who, when he calls his wife, hears a snippet of a conversation he's not supposed to hear. Throughout the rest of the story, as he goes through his increasingly distraught days, the man hears fragments of other people's conversations. What gave you the idea for this conceit? And once you had the idea, did you mostly invent the fragments, or did you spend a few weeks with your ear to the street? I was thinking a lot about street photographers, guys like Garry Winogrand and Robert Frank and Weegee and Cartier-Bresson. Sometimes they had to get right up in people's faces and take aim and go click-click and worry about the consequences later. I admire the hell out of that, probably because I'd never have the guts to do it. I'd worry about raising hackles, even of old ladies, who would then beat the shit out of me with their handbags. But those photographs are some of the best. One day, I realized that I could do something similar while preserving my cowardice. Nobody thinks twice when you're standing nearby typing on your phone, so I'd get up close to people on the street, anybody who looked interesting, and start writing down whatever they said. I was curious to know how much I could overhear and understand, and how much I could fail to understand and still be intrigued. Sometimes I couldn't type fast enough. Invariably, the truncated version was more alive and mysterious than the full account. I never intended to make a story. I was interested in putting speech patterns down on the page (or to be more exact, the screen) and seeing how they looked. Oddly, when I decided to shape them into a story, most of the fragments had to be invented. In many ways, this story reminded me of your first one for the magazine, "The Dinner Party." In both stories, the protagonist is capsized by some hidden knowledge that he blithely sails into. It's also similarly brisk, with lots of moves in a not particularly long story. When you were working on the new story, were you aware of any resonances with the old one? And why is this a vein you like to work in? It is a vein, or a mode, I'd characterize as improvisational. I'm riffing. I care less about plot or structure than I do the conversational drift. I let meaning fall out of the riffs, rather than try to shape the riffs around meaning. I'm always happy to discover that meaning comes even when it's not milked. It suggests itself. In this mode, I'm just trying to hit notes - comedic notes in "The Dinner Party," exotic notes in "The Fragments" - and then gently pursue their suggested direction. Do you think there's a chance that Katy, the wife, is innocent of the imputed affair? My wife did, when she read it. Then we had breakfast with our friend Matt Thomas, who had read it the day prior, and who convicted Katy unequivocally. I wondered at the divide. My wife is regularly shocked at news of friends and acquaintances having affairs. In step, I register shock at her shock. Isn't the real scandal of infidelity at this late stage the eternally scandalized? There has long been a perception that the typical New Yorker story involves adultery among the middle class. Are you happy to have perpetuated that tradition? What are some of your favorite adultery stories or novels? The extravagant quantity and varying quality of illicit screwing, inside the middle class and above and below it, is always interesting and always merits chronicling. Flaubert did it; Tolstoy did it. Chekhov, Joyce, Edith Wharton. Updike, Yates. Carver, Beattie. Now Diaz and Lahiri. Still, The New Yorker can take heart. The chronicling will never outpace the doing. My favorite stories of infidelity are an unsurprising trio by Cheever: "The Chaste Clarissa," "The Five-Forty-Eight," and "The Country Husband," the best of the bunch and nearly as perfect as a story gets. The same can be said for "Last Night" by James Salter. What an elegant little tingle of horror went down my spine as my eyes raced across its final page. For novels, I like Ford Madox Ford's "The Good Soldier" and Kate Chopin's "The Awakening."