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Eastern Europe and Latin America, I think, almost without doubt. Great writing, great thinking, flourishes under pressure. Thinking is a lonely, cancerous, autistic, mad business: to be able to concentrate deeply, innerly. Very few people know how to think; real focused thinking is about the most d…

Very much so. My writing of fiction comes under a very general heading of those teachers, critics, scholars who like to try their own hand once or twice in their lives. My early stories represent already an attempt to think about my central question. I think The Portage of San Cristobel of AH is mo…

We had to cross the river naked, holding our clothes over our head to keep them dry, and then build a warming fire on the other side of the river. It was madness and euphoria.

It was so beautiful. The salmon sky, snow clouds between us and the sun, cast a pearly reddish-goldish light on the whol…

I remember the year Martha said she didn’t love me any more. The baby was seven. The baby is a genius, we think. We knew it even then. She learned to read by the time she was three, and could also tell the difference between a buck track and a doe track. She’s an utter joy to be around. She, as muc…

Martha loves, like so many of us, the big predators, which are generally much more intelligent than their prey: the wolves, bears and lions. She says that hunting is “the primary act of evolution that has most shaped the organic body we call intelligence.” That’s how she’s always talked, and I’ve g…