When you were at the New Yorker, you were part of a group of promising young writers. Do you feel unmoored from that society now?

Well, just before you showed up, the fax machine was printing out a piece of Jamaica Kincaid's. Back then if I had an idea I would walk across the hall and talk to her about it. Now, we talk on the phone, or we see each other; we are still really close. I don't feel unmoored. I talk to Mark Singer pretty regularly. I miss Veronica Geng terribly.

I was infatuated: I loved the New Yorker. Shawn probably thought I was not a particularly loyal guy, because I moved to Montana and I got rid of my office while I was supposedly a staff writer, and I wouldn't sign a contract, for reasons I don't even remember. I found Shawn an oppressive figure and a great figure at the same time. If he was real close to you, you might get a little bit overwhelmed. Yet this guy was really a genius, and he created this work of art, and I wanted to participate in it without feeling like I'd fallen into some kind of Shawn rut. Anyway, it was a complicated relationship.

I think I would have continued there for my whole life if it had continued to be possible. When it fell apart, I was very angry. I was incredibly angry at Newhouse, and I still am. I got along OK with Bob Gottlieb -- I like Bob. And then Tina Brown was a drastic shelving off into nightmare horror.

I would never write for it again. I don't trust the people who own the magazine. I think they did badly by many people who worked for them. I saw what it did to people who were thought of as New Yorker writers and artists; it was impossible to scrape it off at the end.

My conclusion was that you will get your heart broken if you care about an institution. But if you're loyal to people and you really feel affection for them, then you can follow them. I'm writing for some people who are now at their third magazine since I started working for them. I like staying with people, and that has proved to be a better principle than just loving the New Yorker.

But it was really something to lose. I was at the New Yorker for 21 years. And I hate when it comes up: Every so often there's another book and you have to talk about it again.

I was going to ask.

It's like a divorce -- "Oh God, that's what my ex-wife is doing now?" You're always tied to it. At first I'm always resistant: I'm not going to talk about Renata Adler's book ["Gone: The Last Days of the New Yorker"]. I'm not, I'm not. And the next thing I know I'm talking about it.

Have you read it?

No. But I've talked about it. I've probably talked more words about it than are in it.

Will you continue writing for the Atlantic now that William Whitworth has been replaced as editor by Michael Kelly?

I hope I will continue. Bill Whitworth has urged people to. He was a lot nicer than I would have been. I was also angry about that -- but it's possible that this will be a better change than the New Yorker change was. You're always in a situation of hoping. We were hoping at the New Yorker for God knows how many years before we realized that Tina was not going to -- that it wasn't going to work.

Are you still planning a book about Russia?

Yes, that's what I'm working on, a book about Siberia. I was in the city of Provideniya last summer, on the Chukchi Peninsula, which is just across from Nome, Alaska. It's an incredibly cool place -- my favorite place to go.

Do you love the cold?

I do, especially now that it's so rare. I love to get up where you can still see winter. There's so much in Siberia -- obviously it's a huge subject, but I'm always encouraged when I find a subject that has a great genre. And travels in Siberia is an enormous genre; it was very much so in the 19th century and also in the 20th.

Are you working on your Russian?

Yes, I am. It's OK if they talk slowly. And I'm reading. The people in Siberia are incredibly literate people. In 1998 I did a translation of "It Happened Like This," a book by Daniil Kharms, a wonderful, really funny Russian writer who was killed by Stalin in 1942. My favorite piece by him is "Anecdotes from the Life of Pushkin." It's just seven completely ridiculous anecdotes. The first Russian sentence I really learned is from one of them: "Pushkin loved to throw rocks"-- "Pushkin liobil kidatsya kamnyami."

When I was in Siberia we had guides -- people who lived on the tundra -- and we were doing something that involved throwing rocks into a burlap sack to make a big weight. As I was throwing the rocks in I said, "Pushkin liobil kidatsya kamnyami."And everybody laughed. They got it -- they knew the piece. And I thought, God, they know Daniil Kharms! A hundred miles west of Nome, Alaska, they know Kharms!

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