Chapter 1: Home The wind was blowing across the Puget Sound and into Seattle, bringing with it a tang of salt in the air. I stood in the middle of a neglected garden and inhaled the odor of my childhood, thousands of languorous days and nights next to the water. Growing up, I played on […]
The voice of your new novel, of the protagonist Peter Kim, age 12, is unlike any other in literature. Had you developed this voice, or the character, before writing Las Cucarachas? I didn’t set out to develop the voice of the narrator in Las Cucarachas. I did know, however, that I wanted to write a […]
Chapter 1 A chewed-up Nerf flies out of nowhere and smacks me in the head when me and Steven are about ten yards past the super. I turn around to see who threw it and there’s Fatty, smiling like some retard. It’s not even 9 and the bastard’s already got a thick red ring around […]
Chapter 1 Dan Hart died on his son Jonah’s sixth birthday. Jonah waited quietly all day long for his father who, filled with several lunchtime martinis and fumbling with the tape deck, had run off the road and cut his throat on his way through the windshield. Hidden from sight in the gully where he […]
The Prologue: The End No living thing flew over the village of Gibbeah, neither fowl, nor dove, nor crow. Yet few looked above, terrified should an omen come in a shriek or flutter. Nothing flew but dust. It slipped through window blades, door cracks, and the lifting clay of rooftops. Dust coated house and ground, […]
Upon John Quincy Adams’s commencement of studies where all future Presidents get their start—at the University of Leyden, in Holland—his father, John Adams, gave him some advice. According to David McCullough’s Adams biography, your one-stop shopping source for all things John Adams, it was a paternal imperative that John Quincy attend all lectures possible in […]
1. In what way (or ways) does Elwyn resist losing an innocent view of the world despite the fact that he enters into a romantic affair with Sister Morrisohn? 2. Allen’s characters are multilayered and always seem to embody as much evil as good. Describe the evil and good aspects of Brother Morrisohn, Roscoe Parker, […]
V. Testament of Exile Book of Ezekiel 4:13 And the Lord said, Even thus shall the children of Israel eat their defiled bread among the Gentiles, whither I will drive them. The Freshman Jedediah Witherspoon, Reverend Jed as he was called, held court every day at noon in the Plaza of the Americas, a tree-lined […]