Dan Chaon’s terrific first book Fitting Ends came out with a university press and quietly disappeared. Not so with his second, Among the Missing, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and has drawn a near cult following. Dan, married to the writer Sheila Schwartz, is the father of adolescent boys, and a professor at Oberlin College, where his students worship him. “Dan rocks,” one said to me. He does. He is one of the oddest, smartest, most psychologically astute writers working today. His stories manage to be dark and often beautiful, unnerving and revelatory. He is an extraordinarily wide reader and consumer of contemporary culture, activities done mostly from his paper-strewn attic in Cleveland Heights.

—Tom Barbash

BLVR: When I first met you you’d already written several of the stories for Fitting Ends, and you were twenty-four I think. You got going at a pretty young age, no?

DAN CHAON: I was a ridiculously nerdy kid. While the other kids in my high school were having sex and drinking beer, I was writing odd, creepy stories and sending them to the New Yorker and various literary journals under the nom de plume D. Dean Chaon. Don’t ask me why I thought the initial was cool, but I did. Then, when I was a junior, I sent a story to TriQuarterly and the editor there, Reginald Gibbons, was very kind to send a note back, and then when he found out I was sixteen years old, he encouraged me to come to Northwestern. Gibbons ended up becoming a mentor to me and really was one of the best teachers I ever had. My first collection, Fitting Ends, was published by Northwestern University Press and he was the editor.

BLVR: What was that first story about?

DC: It’s sort of embarrassing. It was about a lonely middle-aged man who has a vaguely sexual crush on his twelve-year-old daughter, who is this sort of fey proto-goth girl who collects dead birds. I hesitate to analyze my younger self, but suffice to say that I’m glad the story was never given to a high-school psychologist. I remember the title: “You Are Requested to Close the Eyes.”

BLVR: The stories I remember most clearly (from our workshop together at Syracuse?) were “Going Out,” “Transformations,” “Fraternity,” stories about irresolute outsiders. They are all fairly sad. You once were explaining to me about story I’d written that writers of our generation often take the tone of the songs we listened to as kids.

DC: I think that I just wished that I could be really cool, like a rock star. But I do...