Novelist Marvin Cohen talks about and reads from his 1977 short-story collection The Inconvenience of Living. Host Walter James Milller descibes the distinctive brevity of the parables and fables in the collection, which "make criticism look ridiculous" since any analysis becomes longer and less focused than the original. Cohen reads the stories "The Inconvenience of Living," "Quiet, Confusion at Work," and "An Amicable Solution," and says that his fables originate with a paradoxical thought: "Some half-baked concept which is not complete and which writing would complete." The author descibes his newest works as "novellas of varying length," adding, "I'm learning, somehow, the joy of sustaining a plot," before the two discuss Miller's 1978 book, The Annotated Jules Verne.

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