Activity

I kept resisting their implorations until I went to an Internet café to read up on Richard Macalister. I had heard of him, of course, but had never read any of his books, as I seldom read contemporary American fiction. With an emaciated teenager to my left liquidating scores of disposable video-gam…

Some weeks before, I had received an invitation from the United States ambassador to Bosnia and Herzegovina, His Excellency Eliot Auslander, to join him in honoring Richard Macalister, a Pulitzer Prize winner and acclaimed author. The invitation was sent to my Sarajevo address, only a week or so af…

“Where you throw her, there she lands,” my father said. “But she didn’t have an aunt in New York, she had an older brother. And she was sixteen when she arrived.”

“No, no, she said her brother was killed by a sniper in Sarajevo. And her father had a heart attack in the war, and her mother died o…

I’m holding his manuscript in my hand right now, and I can see the ebb and flow of his concentration; I can decode his back pain increasing and decreasing: smooth, steady handwriting at the top of, say, page ten, which then meanders on page eleven; random words written in the margins (dwarf . . . h…

My father dropped out of his English class, furious at the language that randomly distributed meaningless articles and insisted on having a subject in every stupid sentence. He made cold calls to Canadian companies and in unintelligible English described his life, which included being a diplomat in…