Activity

I was an engineering student in college, at the Colorado School of Mines, and came to fiction late, with a particular understanding of fiction’s purpose. I’d had a powerful experience one summer, reading The Grapes of Wrath at night, in an old RV in my parents’ driveway in Amarillo, after long days…

For the last twenty years, at Syracuse University, I’ve been teaching a class in the nineteenth-century Russian short story in translation. My students are some of the best young writers in America. (We pick six new students a year from an applicant pool of between six and seven hundred.) They arri…