Rivka Galchen in conversation with Karen Russell

Two fiction writers who specialize in tales of the strange, dark and whimsical converse about their latest titles. Russell's recent e-book, Sleep Donation, probes the nature of empathy in a distopian future that finds ordinary citizens turned into insomniacs. In American Innovations, her follow-up to 2008 novel Atmospheric Disturbances, Galchen echoes canonized tales of Gogol, Borges and others with her own sort of magical realism.