For the first part of the interview, click here.

DD: Your first piece as a New Yorker staff writer was a review of a new translation of the Psalms which started "What is God like?" Was this your way of showing that you're not going to pull any intellectual punches just because you're writing for a much larger audience?
JW: [Laughs] I did want to make a statement – no concessions! But, actually, the main difference is that having a more visible location means that there's a kind of criticism which I haven't done much of in the last few years in which I actually try to discover some interesting contemporary fiction that's going on. I don't want to play into this idea that all I've ever been is a negative critic and suddenly, going to the New Yorker, I won't be negative any more. But I'm aware that with so many readers, if I discover some interesting new writer, that's going to be more of a cultural intervention than it would be in the more marginal New Republic. Edmund Wilson, who was in the New Yorker in the forties and did a lot of wonderful criticism of that kind, is a model for me.

DD: Why is that the British press can't produce anything on the same level as the New Yorker or the New Republic or Harpers or the Atlantic Monthly?
JW: One answer is economic. Those magazines are sustained by wealthy patrons who choose either to lose money or barely break even on what might be termed vanity projects. Fortunately they're vain about things that matter to us! Even the New Yorker used to lose a lot of money under Tina Brown, but the guy who owns Conde Nast is willing to let that happen. And I suppose the other answer is in part that a healthy magazine culture keeps going because the newspaper culture is so poor. There is the New York Times or the Washington Post, but the vibrancy of newspaper print journalism in London isn't there in America. So people go somewhere and they end up in the magazines, or increasingly now in the blogosphere.

DD: Why did you choose this moment to write How Fiction Works?
JW: It's the natural product of what is now a few years of teaching for me. I hadn't taught before, but I started teaching in 2003 at Harvard as a half-time job. And as part of that I've been teaching graduate creative writing students at Columbia every so often, so in the last few years I've been studying texts and talking about quite a number of the issues that come up in the book. I wanted to gather them together and it seemed a natural way to do it. And as I say in the introduction there aren't a great many little books like this.

DD: In a recent interview Philip Roth said that "you can't have computers and iPods and BlackBerries and blueberries and raspberries, and have time left to sit for two or three hours with a book." Do you read as much as you'd like?
JW: The problem with making a living by reviewing is that to some extent I'm a prisoner of the books that are sent to me. It would be wonderful to have the time that an academic has. But then Roth is an extreme example: he has a hermit-like existence which is why he can write so much fiction. I do find it hard to sustained bouts of reading because I'm a slow reader and I'm also physically restless and I do generate enormous number of reasons to put the book down and do something else – which may be an interesting psychological reason for my lack of interest in plot. But when people say to me, "How do you read so much?", the only answer I have is that I don't do anything else.

How Fiction Works is published by Jonathan Cape.