In Nicole Krauss' new collection To Be A Man, there is a story called Future Emergencies in which, due to a mysterious catastrophe, gas masks are distributed to the people of the United States.

"For a long time, they said we didn't need them," says the narrator, "but then something changed and they said that we did."

She muses on where the threat will come from. "The threat may come from an unknown source," the radio replies.

She thinks: "Even when the news is bad, I am glad to have been answered."

It might sound like Krauss, 46, produced Future Emergencies for the present Covid-19 pandemic, but it is in fact the oldest story in the collection, written just after the Sept 11, 2001 attacks.

"I think, in some sense, the anxiety that began with 9/11 has extended over these nearly 20 years," says the American author over Skype from her home in Brooklyn.

"It's a long arc and it doesn't seem to be lessening.

"I myself can't quite get over how strange it was to go back and read that story as I was putting the final touches on the collection.

"When I was writing that, it still seemed absurd to be walking around with masks, to have one's face covered because of the danger of the world and what we might breathe in."

Krauss is the best-selling author of novels such as The History Of Love (2005) and Great House (2010), and has been shortlisted twice for the Orange Prize and once for the National Book Award.

Her work often explores Jewish culture and history, though she is quick to clarify: "I'm not a Jewish writer, I'm a writer who happens to be Jewish."

She adds: "There's the paradox of both being happy to be read and celebrated by one's people, but at the same time having an absolute refusal in the depths of one's soul to be claimed by anyone."

To Be A Man is her first short fiction collection. Its stories manage to be both intimate and faintly apocalyptic. In End Days, fires blaze through California while a young delivery worker scrambles to get her parents' divorce paperwork to their rabbi.

In Amour, the newest story in the collection, a man meets the woman he fancied decades ago in a refugee camp in a future America.

Krauss wrote Amour in January this year, after news broke that a US drone strike had killed Iranian major general Qasem Soleimani and many feared political retaliation.

It was the culmination, she says, of four years' worth of worry over the refugee crisis, climate degradation and Mr Donald Trump's presidency, though none of that makes it explicitly into the story.

"All of those things are cooking in all of our minds, a low but steady boil in the back of our emotional lives," she says.

"I wanted to write a story about this relationship, the personal that happens in the shadow of enormous events."

Krauss has often thought about what it would be like to be a man. "I grew up with a very strong sense of identifying with men, because to identify with women - given the models I had available to me as a young girl - would have been to identify with forms of subjugation or an inability to access strength or independence.

"I've never longed to be a man, but I longed for those freedoms and I found them in men, and I tried, as best as I could, to absorb them into my being. But I think, as I've gotten older, I have begun to truly appreciate the choice of what it is to be a woman."

The title story, To Be A Man, is about "a woman with an enormous amount of experience with men" who has two sons.

"It's about what it is to raise boys with the knowledge of what it is to be a woman, and what it is to look at men in one's life struggling with the idea of what it is to be a man."

Krauss herself has two sons aged 14 and 11 with writer Jonathan Safran Foer, best known for his novels Everything Is Illuminated (2002) and Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close (2005).

Once among the power couples of literary Brooklyn, they divorced in 2014 after 10 years of marriage.

In 2017, she published her fourth novel, Forest Dark.

It intertwines the journeys of two narrators in Tel Aviv - one a freshly divorced millionaire lawyer, 68; the other a novelist trying to escape a failing marriage and writer's block.

The fact that the novelist is called Nicole drew many assumptions that Forest Dark was autobiographical. Krauss considers such readings "blinkered".

She says: "All of my stories, even the ones that seem far-flung from my life, are filled with personal influence and touched by invention. Readers shouldn't make the mistake that the things we write are autobiographical.

"They're a mix of the deeply personal and the imagined."

Asked if she is now single or in a relationship, she cryptically quotes from the story To Be A Man, about the "no-man's-land where one stood utterly undefended, with nothing that one has promised and nothing that has been promised to one, but with a bright, clear view that goes on and on, all the way to the horizon".

With a wry laugh, she adds: "Suffice to say that the freedom - the purity of what it is to wake up every day and know that one can do anything, that anything can happen to one, that all experiences are available to one - is still not a feeling that I'm willing to relinquish."

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