The world is crammed with messages. We’ll never have time to read them all.

There is always a gap between conception and execution. We keep writing in the burning hope of closing that gap before we die.

We inherit plots. There are only two or three in the world, five or six at most. We ride them like treadmills.

It often seems to me that the biggest single issue for a writer is how to stay buoyant enough to go on writing. How not to drown.

Herschel Grynszpan's life was enigmatic, elusive and tragic. The traces he left on the historical record are just sufficient to tantalize and baffle historians. Harlan Greene has woven from these threads a riveting novel, erotic, haunting, and profoundly moving.

That is where homeland is. In that shifting space, kinfolk know one another by secret signs and wherever kinfolk meet, homeland soil coalesces about their feet in the mysterious way that coral cays, like seabirds pausing in flight, anchor themselves to the Barrier Reef.

The futility of action does not absolve one from the failure to act. -