ALEKSANDAR HEMON: I used to write a lot for magazines and radio in Sarajevo, which taught me that writing is evanescent: magazines are thrown away, and radio moments exist briefly and then they perish. That experience gave me a different take on rejection, inasmuch as it prevented me from taking myself too seriously, which obviously makes rejection less painful. Anyone who thinks that writing can make him or her immortal is a damn fool. Writing is inherently a symptom of mortality—t lives and dies with or without you, regardless of acceptance or rejection. Furthermore, I think that a writer should know when something is good-being able to recognize what works and what doesn't is a pare of the job-which means that the acceptance-rejection thing only pertains to the career aspect of the writing, and that never depends on the writer anyway. If you start waiting for the reviews to tell you whether your book is good, it's time to do something else.

The whole thing was a public-relations nightmare for the CIA, which was forced to deny ordering over eighty kiloliters of beer delivered to Martyr’s Park in downtown Ottawa. Mulroney’ s men confiscated all our documents, and then they began killing us. Vu was thrown down an ice crevasse, Scotty was immolated below the launchpad of a Yukon ballistic base, and rumor has it that Mansoor’s last date was with our own centrifugal chamber. The labs were burned and the bunkers buried in an attempt to hide the embarrassing truth that the great nation of Canada could put a man on the moon, but not bring him back. The only evidence this country ever even had a space program is the total wasteland we made of north-central Canada.

“Wouldn’cha know he missed the moon,” Vu said, “by about a heck of a lot, eh.”

“Make you now an around turn,” I said to Jacques. “U-turn.”

“Oui,” he said. “L’espace ressemble à l’uterin. L’acte du creation est tres evident. ”