…I think I knew pretty quickly that she was going to be Japanese-Mexican. It was an intuitive choice that I came to better understand later on. AN: It’s obvious from reading her that she was a lot of fun to write. CG: Yes—I think I have this thing for Amazonian women; there are a lot of them rampaging through the… [Read More]

…kitchen. We’d been on a flight that passed over Ukraine just hours after the Malaysian plane crashed: returning from a trip to Cyprus and Turkey, we were about to leave Istanbul when we heard the news. Once we returned home, I couldn’t stop reading about that Malaysian jet being shot down, thinking about the people who became bodies that fell… [Read More]

…you were familiar with James Michener, whose Alaska she was reading for her book club. You listened to their pleasantries, trying to detect a note of disappointment, a wistful wish that their son had found himself a white girlfriend instead. You heard nothing but geniality. They seemed to embody a term you had come across when reading Edith Wharton: “well-bred.”… [Read More]

…removed his reading glasses and wiped them with his shirttail. He would think it over. Yakov and his wife were enjoying the respite they awarded themselves every January, except the year his mother died. Seven days of warmth and summer books under palm trees. Seven tropical nights crowded with food, music, exotic drinks and fresh faces. New friends from faraway… [Read More]

…newspaper that almost no one but the aging and aged read, but he leans in close as if reading something very important to wait the pre-planned five minutes for Mac to enter. “Which mask should I wear? Theresa or Gandhi?” Mac had asked Odon in the car. “Surprise me,” Odon had said, and he is actually surprised when Mac walks… [Read More]

…read it once, twice, and saw again the deep furrows around your mother’s mouth, vivid in your mind from earlier when she’d drifted away from your cab toward the airport counters. The loneliness you always felt after reading her letters suffocated you now. The room echoed thickly with your breathing, and you sat for a while clutching the letter, upset… [Read More]

…Summit — University of Minnesota Arboretum, Fall 1998 We meet outside the city to discuss the mind of poetry, and crowning the speaker’s head, the arboretum fills up the conference room’s window: an epiphany of maples. The papery consciousness of birch against the sky’s blue concentration flags the roots of our connections. But reading the daily papers — from New… [Read More]

…men possibly share with the shimmering beckon and promise of Paris? As for my father, I had never thought to question his loyalty, or whether he felt the same as our neighbors. I had simply assumed it. But in the wake of Khalida’s words a bright barbed fear had taken root in my chest, spreading rampant as a weed. My… [Read More]

…eighth most e-mailed New York Times article is about a deadly swine flu outbreak in Mexico. Scientists are “baffled and deeply worried.” I learn two reasons to be baffled and deeply worried in my Mexico City apartment. One: this flu seems to combine bird, swine, and human viruses. Two: this flu is spreading person to person. . . . I… [Read More]

The first morning after my last day of fifth grade, Mom informed me that my summer vacation and girlhood were over. Me: Reading A Wrinkle in Time in my room, hoping to pull a Meg Murry and tesseract to another planet. Mom (with a cursory knock while opening the door): “Great news! You get to attend those Summer Enrichment Seminars… [Read More]