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“I used to be a student here at Stanford,” the screenwriter began. “Right here. I used to study computer programming. I used to work all night in the computer cluster next door. Then I took a creative writing class to learn how to write stories. There, my teacher assigned Isaac Babel’s story ‘My Fi…

I told her about my freshman advisor, a middle-aged British woman with a kind, weary demeanor, who worked in the telecommunications office and had never once known the answer to a single question I had asked.

“The telecommunications office?” Anna repeated.

I nodded. “I would see her when I we…

We drove by another billboard: “Ted Lempert for State Senate.”

“Ted Lempert,” Lidiya mused, then turned to me. “Who is this Ted Lempert?”

I said that I didn’t know, but that I thought he wanted to be a senator.

“Hmm,” she said. “Lempert. I knew a Lempert once—an artist. His name was Vladim…

In this way I managed to get locked in the archive; I was sitting at my carrel and lost track of time, and suddenly all the lights went out. When I got up, I realized that the entire library was not only dark but also deserted and locked. I banged on the locked doors for a while with no result, the…

Really everyone who wins the Nobel Prize does seem overrated. Is this the best anyone can do? you wonder. Note to self, she thinks: Don’t win Nobel Prize. So far there is little danger. Three months ago she sent out her best short story to five publications; the result to date is two perfunctory re…