She ruins you. A page into Amy Hempel's latest slim collection of stories, The Dog of the Marriage, and you're captivated. A couple of chapters later and you're in love. That last page -- that goddamned last page -- it breaks your heart.

It's over and you'll wonder how you'll ever read anyone else again.

But don't take my word for it. Amy's stories present a montage of scenes that assemble themselves in your mind like a dream. Gritty, raw, funny, erotic. "At any horrible moment," Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk says, "you might pick up a copy of Hempel and find your best work is just a cheap rip-off of her worst." 

The title story of her new collection opens like this:

On the last night of the marriage, my husband and I went to the ballet. We sat behind a blind man; his guide dog, in harness, lay beside him in the aisle of the theater. I could not keep my attention on the performance; instead, I watched the guide dog watch the performance. Throughout the evening, the dog's head moved, following the dancers across the stage. Every so often the dog would whimper slightly. "Because he can hear high notes we can't?" my husband said. "No," I said, "because he was disappointed in the choreography."

Funny yet tragic moments cascade off the page unencumbered by torturous transitions or improbable plot lines. "That's what I think anybody can recognize - moments," she said in our interview, "a moment that stands out for a particular reason, where the light shifted."

Something that defies much of the conventional wisdom about writing, provoking critics like Sven Birkets in the New Republic to accuse Amy of abrogating "literary responsibility" altogether.

Whatever the fuck that means.

For all of their spare prose, her stories are imbued with a palpable sense of depth, a hulking shadow under the waves. As Hemingway said:

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.

This sense of depth is the product of recursion. Each sentence is the product of the ones that came before.  Amy said, "Gordon [Lish] used to talk about 'recursive writing' - you go back to what you did before and you veer from it. You can't help but create a feeling - not of just layering - but of going deeper and deeper down -- amplifying the thing each time you hit it. Really it's about a kind of logical writing where what you did before tells you what to do next."

The Dog of the Marriage is Amy's fourth collection. Reasons to Live, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom and Tumble Home were all equally impressive. Her first story, In the Cemetery where Al Jolson is Buried -- a deeply touching story about the death of her best friend -- has been translated into over seventeen languages and has been widely anthologized.

For aspiring writers, Minimalist or otherwise, Amy has simple advice: "Get better friends. I just have such amazingly wonderful, inspiring friends who are extremely quotable. It's really wonderful to be in the company of people you love to listen to. And read! You read these things that make you want to respond, something that gets me to that place where I feel smarter and brave enough to try and say something back."

Brave enough to ruin you. Brave enough to break your heart.