Last month saw the publication of Dictionary Stories, a pan-generic collection of very short stories by Jez Burrows. The word “by” here has a peculiar depth: the constituent parts of each dictionary story come wholesale, or almost, from the example sentences that accompany definitions in one of twelve different English dictionaries. Meanwhile, at the end of last year, Troll Thread released Tom Comitta’s Airport Novella, which is likewise more assembled than created—in this case out of four gestures—nods, shrugs, odd looks, and gasps—as they appear, often, in the work of authors like Dan Brown and Danielle Steel. Both Burrows and Comitta challenge the parameters of fiction by blurring the lines between composition and arrangement, turning pattern recognition into a sort of prose mosaic masonry in which most of the writing, as Comitta puts it, is done with scissors and tape. We asked them to connect the dots between their respective techniques, aims, and inspirations; without so much as a shrug or a gasp, they obliged.

—Daniel Levin Becker

TOM COMITTA: So, why did you write Dictionary Stories? What led you to it?

JEZ BURROWS: I was reading the dictionary on a Friday night (because that’s the sort of white-knuckle life I lead) and I found this example sentence for the word study in the New Oxford American Dictionary, which read “he perched on the edge of the bed, a study in confusion and misery.” It was so melodramatic and unexpected, and it made me realize I’d never really given these sentences much thought before. I ended up just sat there reading the dictionary in a completely new way—which is to say completely disregarding the main attraction (the definitions) and instead focusing on these odd little pieces of fiction hanging out in a book of reference.

TC: In the introduction you talk about how you went from the “study” sentence, and happened upon another sentence that seemed thematically linked. You found other sentences that also happened to fit into this image of a depressed person sitting on a bed. When you combined them the image began to grow, the room around this unnamed character became untidy, etc.

JB: Yeah, it was actually another example for study: “he perched on the edge of the bed, a study in confusion and misery,” comma, “a study of a man devoured by his own mediocrity.” They seemed as if they belonged together. That was the flashpoint: realizing I had access to thousands of pieces of an infinite number of jigsaw puzzles, all of which could be any shape or size.

TC: You’ve taken these sentences and created everything from short short stories to lists to...