Category Archives: International

Jenny Kidd by Laury A. Egan

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Need to escape from this gloomy January weather? How about a vacation in sunny Italy—Venice to be exact. In her new book, Jenny Kidd, author Laury A. Egan recreates La Serenissima so believably, you’ll be surprised when you look up from her pages and discover it’s still the middle of winter!

Jenny is visiting Venice in order to pursue her desire to become painter and, it’s fair to say, to escape her overbearing father in America. Though she’s twenty-five, he’s convinced she shouldn’t be so far away, unsupervised, much less pursuing a career in the arts that is most likely to come to nothing. So he believes. And tells her, repeatedly.

At a gallery visit, she meets another young woman with an odd British accent and sketchy details, Randi Carroll. Randi is congenial but overly familiar—flirtatious actually—and tells Jenny about a costume party planned for that evening. The parties are held once a month at the palazzo of the wealthy Barbon family. Jenny decides to go, rents a costume, and it’s an unsettling, lavishly described event.

The guests don’t remove their masks, and she can’t tell if she’s dancing with a man or a woman. Having too many drinks doesn’t help. She does dance with one unmasked person, a beautiful woman wearing a distinctive rose-colored satin gown. Dancing with her is surprisingly sexy. This reaction, after the flirtatiousness of Randi unsettle Jenny.

In a day or two, she has occasion to meet the costume party hosts, Caterina Barbon and her younger brother, Sebatiano. Caterina is exceptionally beautiful, and she and Jenny agree she should paint Caterina’s portrait. To her delight, it’s turning out quite well. Through Caterina’s many connections, Jenny meets a Venetian art dealer who wants to see more of her work. Her excitement over these promising new friendships and career developments—and her determination to not give in to her father’s worldview—outweigh what, in other circumstances, might be natural caution. In fact, she ignores the warning signs: her flat has been robbed and, much worse, the delectable woman in the rose satin gown has turned up dead, floating in the lagoon.

You may think Jenny’s father’s judgment is not so off-base when she takes up residence with the seductive and aristocratic Barbon siblings, who turn out to be pansexual. Surprising herself, she and Caterina begin a relationship, and it isn’t until she realizes she cannot leave the house—bars on the windows, locked doors, that her suspicions start to grow. From there on, the book takes on a heightened emotional intensity and unexpected twists that will leave you breathless.

The sexual energy in Egan’s work is undeniable. And she’s not afraid to include characters who are complex and diverse. I’ve read four of her books and find that she doesn’t add a particular trait because it might be trendy, her characters are fully rounded.

And, I note that the cover of the first of her thrillers I read, The Psychologist’s Shadow, featured several elaborate Venetian carnival masks. Thinking about these four books, the idea of masks is a very apt theme for her work. You’ll be hoping Jenny can see behind them in time.

Permissible Laughter

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In a thought-provoking interview with award-winning Lebanese-Canadian novelist, journalist, and visual artist Rawi Hage a few years back, he talked about how it’s the writer’s job to push the limits, to not settle for being only entertaining. For me this resonates with the idea that authors shouldn’t try to bang out the next “The Girl Who. . .” book, but strike out into some new territory. Of course, for many, it seems, they run up against a failure of imagination or an excess of anxiety, which is why when a particular book catches on, it will have so many clones. In a contradiction bound eventually to fail, many authors try to recapture that uniqueness.

Think, for example of Dan Brown’s books and all the religio-cryptic thrillers that came afterward. Or all the books where a discrete set of people with a shared past and rivalries and bitter secrets are stranded on an island, in a remote area cut off by a storm, or wherever, and . . . they start to die. Or the Gone Girl clones, or, rather, would-be clones.

Hage said he thinks of himself as “a confrontational writer,” and the more marginal he feels about a piece, the better his writing is. In other words, he’s not trying to please everyone. “Writers who try to please and go by the rules and try to do the right things, they tend to fail,” he thinks. It’s an interesting stance to take, and difficult for authors, when the publishing industry seems increasingly risk-averse.

He talked interestingly about the way the Arabic language affected his writing. He read a lot of Arabic poetry as a young man, and it’s very visual, perhaps making up for strictures on visual representations of people and animals in the culture generally. It’s a “very elaborate” language, he says. Writing in English, he pared back.

Even so, he brings “bags and bags of history, travels, concerns, revenge; a mixture of the emotional, the experiential, and the cultural” to his writing. That comports with my view of writing as like assembling a jigsaw puzzle with a thousand disparate pieces of the kinds he mentions, and seeing what picture they create. He wisely infuses that mix with dark humor too. Pavlov, the protagonist of his fourth novel, Beirut Hellfire Society, says, “Laughter should be permissible under all circumstances.”

An Irish Classic: the International

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hotel bar, barman
(photo: shankar s, creative commons license)

“If I had known history was to be written that Sunday in the International Hotel I might have made an effort to get out of bed before teatime,” writes Daniel Hamilton, an 18-year-old Belfast bartender and narrator of Glenn Patterson’s novel The International: A Novel of Belfast.

The history he refers to is the meeting to launch the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), an organization formed to focus attention on discrimination against Northern Ireland’s mostly Catholic nationalist minority. We call the succeeding three decades of violence and despair The Troubles, and The International “is the best book about the Troubles ever written,” says Irish author and Booker-Prize-winner Anne Enright.

Funny thing is, there’s almost no overt violence in this book, apart from the fact it’s set in a busy bar with lots of coming and going and football on the telly and political shenanigans where money changes hands and gay men and straight women hoping to meet someone and people who should have stopped drinking hours before ordering another and weddings upstairs in the hotel, at one of which the clergyman plays an accordion. In other words, enough latent violence in reserve to keep the average semi-sober person on his toes.

The principal action of the novel takes place during on Saturday evening, January 28, 1967, the night before the big meeting, larded with Danny Hamilton’s memories of other times and barroom encounters. His minutely observed portrayal of everyday life as seen from behind the bar is heartbreaking when, with the lens of hindsight, the reader knows how soon it will all be gone, sucked into a slowly unwinding catastrophe of bombs and gunfire.

The quote at the top of this piece opens the book, and these words about a barmen who was shot dead, Peter Ward, also age 18, help close it:

I can’t tell you much else about him, except that those who knew him thought the world of him. He is, I realise, an absence in this story. I wish it were not so, but guns do that, create holes which no amount of words can fill.

I wrote about this book and a visit to Princeton by Belfast author Glenn Patterson a few years ago, and it seems apt to return to it on St. Patrick’s Day, especially given his writing’s emphasis on history and politics and his deep sense of place. He said that “when history looks back at our present, it will see that what we thought we were at and what we were at, really, were entirely different.” When we think about our current moment in America, that is a sobering thought.

Here’s Glenn Patterson’s list of his top 10 books about Belfast, compiled in 2012.

Last Night at Villa Lucia by Simon McCleave

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What could be more appealing than a murder mystery set in an elegant villa high on a hill overlooking the Tuscan countryside? Prolific crime novelist Simon McCleave’s Last Night at Villa Lucia feels like a vacation from the first page.

A few flies in the ointment—or in this case, vodka—soon appear. The middle-aged woman who owns Villa Lucia has a significant drinking problem, once controlled with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous, but now seriously relapsed. This, and the death that follows, is all foreshadowed in an unnecessary prologue, lifted from a place well into the story. Chapter One rewinds to two days earlier with the arrival of a new set of guests—the overbearing, deeply entitled Harry Collard, his mousy wife Zoe, and their handsome nineteen-year-old son, Charlie.

When the family arrives at the villa, they find their hostess, Cerys, who’s divorced, and her luscious daughter Lowri, about Charlie’s age. One plot point boldly forecasts itself from the moment Harry meets Lowri.

So. At least until the police arrive, you have two couples (one dad absent, but very “present” in the minds of his ex-wife and daughter). Two young adults. And, rounding out the cast, the two people who keep the place humming—Lucia De Nardi, the maid, who grew up in the villa before her uncle lost possession of it, a sore point for sure, and her husband, Lorenzo, who has a sketchy past and takes care of the pool and the gardens.

You see some of the English husbands’ arrogant behavior, in real time, in flashback, and in what the women say about them. This story might fail the Bechdel test—which checks whether a book or movie “features at least two female characters who have a conversation about something other than a man.” (Thanks, Wikipedia.) Granted, Cerys and Zoe do occasionally talk about fashion or food.

You know from the prologue that someone ends up in the infinity pool, and they aren’t swimming. That death occurs, about two days into the Collards’ stay, and by then you probably have a favored candidate for drowning and a universe of potential motives.

McCleave effectively conveys the enervating heat, the villa’s isolation, and the effects of too much alcohol, so that the arrival of the sober Policia di Stato Detective Franco Saachi is a relief. Naturally, the villa occupants don’t tell him everything. At least not right off. In a postscript, McCleave tells readers that his intentions for this book were to explore toxic masculinity, alcoholism, and abusive relationships. He achieved this goal, with a few caveats. Making both husbands so very toxic doesn’t give the narrative much nuance. It was good to see Cerys and Zoe open up to each other, and good for them, too. Cerys’s preoccupation with alcohol became a bit redundant, but it was probably an accurate way to portray this particular addiction. McCleave does give his characters some grace at the book’s end, as a reward—to you and them—for suffering through their travails. Meanwhile, you can enjoy the spectacular setting.

Let’s Make English More Efficient!

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Here are a few amazing words from an article a friend in Arizona sent. Bill DeMain compiled this list of single words for Mental Floss that express things and feelings that need a whole sentence (or two) to get across in English. See all 38 here, and prepare to wonder at the universality of human experience!

Boketto (Japanese) – when you gaze vacantly into the distance, thinking of nothing. My cats do that a lot.

Tartle (Scots) – that panicky feeling you have when you must introduce someone and their name has flown right out of your head.

Iktsuarpok (Inuit) – that feeling when you’re expecting someone to show up and you keep checking outside to see whether they’ve arrived.

Greng-jai (Thai) – that feeling when someone wants to do something for you, but you know it would be a problem for them, so you don’t want them to do it. (Too many of us aren’t that considerate.)

Gigil (Filipino) – when you have an irresistible urge to pinch or squeeze something, often accompanied by squealing “soooo CUTE!”

Lagom (Swedish) – when something is neither too much or too little, but exactly right. DeMain asked a pertinent question: “Maybe Goldilocks was Swedish?”

Zeg (Georgian) – the day after tomorrow

This word—actually, it’s more than one word—that I could use daily: L’esprit de l’escalier (French) – literally, stairwell wit—a retort that occurs to you only after you and your conversation partner have gone your separate ways. In my case, it could be L’esprit au milieu de la nuit. 3 a.m., maybe.

And here’s one I thought of myself: Repoussé (French) – appropriately, the word came to me in the middle of the night (some random synapse firing) and I made a correct guess about what it means. Repoussé is a metalworking technique in which the artist hammers on the back side of a piece of metal so that the design appears on the front. These amazing battlefield shell casings from a display at the Arizona Copper Art Museum are an example—probably where I encountered this word I didn’t know I knew.

CIA veteran David McCloskey’s New Thriller: Moscow X

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Two years ago, David McCloskey hit it big with his debut espionage novel, Damascus Station. Hordes of readers, intelligence professionals, and critics alike praised its realism and lively, timely plot. His new book, Moscow X, is even better, with more than one pundit calling him “The new John Le Carré.”

There’s no point in suggesting the plot in anything other than broad brush strokes because, in the tradition of the best spy fiction, what’s happening on the surface, the day-to-day events, are only a small part of the picture. And probably misleading too. I saw this story as essentially about the interplay of three women, all three well characterized, committed, and worth rooting for. But vastly different agendas.

Outspoken and profane Artemis Aphrodite Procter is back, heading a new CIA unit called Moscow X whose aim is to undermine the Russian Federation and—yes, McCloskey names names—Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. Her unconventional approach to spycraft gives her a creative edge in this job and, naturally, keeps her skating on some pretty thin bureaucratic ice. Hortensia Fox is a CIA operative working at a London law firm that specializes in handling the assets of wealthy Russians. Calling herself Sia, she’s busily trolling for information and cultivating contacts. Anna Andreevna Agapova is a Russian FSB agent, member of a wealthy Russian family, and married to an even wealthier man she cannot stand, for good reason. The Agapova family is being systematically shut out of the government power structure and, as the story opens, a huge portion of its wealth is stolen at the behest of a Putin intimate. Anna and her father believe (or prefer to believe) this occurred outside Putin’s awareness, and they want their money back.

Procter, as much a fireball as ever, sees an opportunity for Sia to use this theft as an opening wedge that will lead to, well, who knows? Maybe getting the money back and maybe in a way that looks like a coup was in the works. If Putin hasn’t paid attention to the internecine warfare among his cronies, he cannot ignore an attempted coup. And would take dramatic, destabilizing action in response.

Procter’s team develops a rather charming ruse to get Anna and her husband, Vadim, in contact with the Western agents. Vadim and Anna live on a large horse farm outside Saint Petersburg. Sia offers a visit to an elegant Mexican horse farm, headed by Maximiliano Castillo—around Sia’s age and handsome—leaving out the critical detail that the farm has been a CIA front for decades. All Max and Sia need do is act like a couple and winkle their way into the Russians’ confidence, Anna’s at least, through the business of buying and selling and riding thoroughbreds. It becomes a clever cat-and-mouse game between Anna and Sia and your opinion of which is the cat and which the mouse will keep changing.

Difficulty piles onto difficulty. What makes this book such an exciting read is that, between the Russians’ impenetrable motivations and the Western agents’ complicated and shifting agendas, there is no end to the potential dangers Max and Sia and Anna face, with Procter wringing her hands back in Langley. Although all the characters’ actions make sense, according to their own visions of reality and self-interest, you nevertheless can’t predict what will happen when you turn the page. When your operative in a hostile country starts looking for a beam she can throw a noose over, you know the situation has reached a desperate point.

Oh, and did I mention it’s winter in Russia? Lots of snow. Snow everywhere. You can’t hide your tracks or your heat sig and, of course, those drones with their facial recognition technology are watching. When Max and Sia visit Anna, they know microphones and cameras are everywhere, even in the bedroom, so their being a couple has to seem real to those watchers—more challenging than it sounds.

McCloskey effectively evokes the paranoia and suspicion of the autocratic Russian state, in contrast to sunny San Cristobal. The author avoids most mention of the drug cartels, and you may wonder how the Castillo family keeps that brand of violence away from their barns and pastures, but so much bad stuff is going on—you’ll never miss it.

Order it here through my affiliate link.

Past Lying by Val McDermid

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Publication of a new police procedural featuring Val McDermid’s intrepid Detective Chief Inspector Karen Pirie is something to get excited about. In Past Lying, the streets of Edinburgh have never been so ominous—and empty—as when this story takes place in April 2020, at the height of the covid epidemic. Authors were of mixed minds about whether to write about covid, thinking “too much already!” but McDermid makes the lockdown an effective handicap to Pirie, whose investigation of a not-quite-stone-cold case must (at least in theory) accommodate the public health restrictions.

Pirie and Detective Sergeant Daisy Mortimer are camped out in Pirie’s boyfriend Hamish’s fancy flat while he has relocated up north to tend his sheep farm in the Highlands. He’s bought a former gin still up there and is manufacturing hand sanitizer.

As ever, Pirie has a couple of pots bubbling away. One complication in her life is a subplot involving a Syrian refugee being hunted by assassins from his home country. I’ve always admired how McDermid keeps two powerful story strands going, such that when she switches from one to the other, I’m instantly engrossed again. In this instance, the secondary plot isn’t as compelling as it might be, and the exigencies of covid mean there is less interaction with some of Pirie’s colleagues in various crime labs who serve such a satisfying role in other works.

The main plot is more squarely in the domain of Pirie’s Historic Cases Unit. In touch with her by telephone, Detective Constable Jason ‘The Mint’ Murray reports that a librarian, reviewing papers submitted by the estate of a deceased Tartan Noir crime writer, Jake Stein, has run across the opening chapters of an unpublished manuscript. They describe a murder that sounds eerily similar to an unsolved disappearance from the previous year, in which an Edinburgh University student named Lara Hardie vanished.

What Jake Stein has written compel Pirie and Mortimer to dig into his past. Stein was apparently not a very nice guy; he was in the middle of a marital calamity; and his formerly successful career was on the skids. His only remaining friend is another author who’d come and play chess with him and where Stein would talk about “the perfect murder.” The parallels between Stein’s real life and his fictional book are striking, so that the narrative takes on the characteristics of nested dolls. I found myself having to stop and think, am I reading Stein’s book? Or about him?

If you have read other McDermid books featuring Pirie (this is the seventh), you may have run across DC Jason Murray previously. You may recall he’s sometimes considered not the brightest bulb, but in this book, he finally comes into his own. I don’t know why, maybe it’s the stresses of lockdown, but I found Pirie a less sympathetic character than usual. At times, she’s almost mean. She pays lip service to the lockdown rules, but ignores them whenever she wants to. The justification that every day is important to the family of a disappeared person wore a little thin.

A crime novelist is an ideal character to obsess about the perfect crime, and Stein’s draft-cum-confession, as you read it, raises a multitude of good questions—not necessarily relevant to his plot, nor his personal life, but about Pirie’s investigation. Nesting dolls again.

While McDermid has certainly earned the sobriquet of Britain’s ‘Queen of Crime,’ I confess to a slight disappointment with this latest book. Of course, it’s still head and shoulders above many crime novels, and if you like the Pirie character, you won’t want to miss it.

The Long Creative Life

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Hong Kong (now U.S.) author Xu Xi has published essays, appeared in and published anthologies, and novels, including The Unwalled City: A Novel of Hong Kong. In sum, fifteen books. In an interview, she shared some thoughts about the creative life that would encourage authors, both aspiring and experienced. “Being a writer is also an issue if you’re not published” (or, perhaps, not published where you want to be). And it’s hard to break into U.S. literary journals, short story publishing, “never mind selling novels.”

Xu found that living in New York City, enough people were trying to be an artist of some kind—musician, painter, actor, novelist—that made life easier. They understood her. They understood her day job was just a way to put groceries on the table. This is a heartfelt validation of the importance of “community.” Some of us find it in groups of other writers. Some find it in groups outside the writing community.

Still, Xu had to reach a point where the daily demands on her were not primarily about relationships, family, and work, in order to be free to write beyond herself. She quotes Confucius’s description of the various decades of life, which culminate at the point that you can “follow [your] heart’s desire without overstepping the line.” Alas, the Master said that point comes when you reach an advanced age, which maybe is why we hear about authors (like me!) whose first book is published after age 50. Not that that’s a piece of cake, either.

Xu, who is past 50 herself, says she thinks of writing “as fate, destiny, the thing you were born to do but didn’t know how to go about or weren’t quite ready for when you were younger.” Interestingly, in her day jobs she was considered a quick study, but she finds the process of writing, “incredibly slow.” Nevertheless, she finds pleasure in learning how to improve, which is long-term and yields incremental improvements. It’s fulfilling in a deep, “things are right with the world” sense, which more quickly mastered accomplishments often lack. How many times are authors pitched on “this book,” “this course,” or “this software” that will lead them down an immediate and short path to success?

International artists who write in English, Xu believes, are one way for readers to better understand both the universal aspects of life while appreciating differences in human experience and building empathy with people whose perspectives are different. This comes to the fore in her writer’s guide and anthology, The Art and Craft of Asian Stories.

At some point Xu realized she “could waste an enormous amount of creative time and energy on all kinds of ‘okay’ things, and, as well, produce work that might actually prove more readily publishable.” That choice would mean other work would suffer—work that require a deeper examination of our interior selves to reach for the fundamental, rather than the superficial. Such works don’t demand that you stretch your writing muscles. Xu is willing to do this and thereby is, she believes, writing to the future of the English language.

Xu Xi is the Jenks Chair in Contemporary Letters at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.

The Lost Americans

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If you’ve ever traveled to Egypt, Christopher Bollen’s fast-paced new thriller, The Lost Americans, will take you back there. And, if you’ve never been, when you finish this book, you may feel as if you’ve made the trip. The Sahara dust settling on everything, the smells of baking bread and dirty camels, the competing cries of the muzzeins, the golden, dust-laden light of late afternoon, and the vicious, inches-to-spare traffic.

Manhattanite Cate Castle has never visited Egypt, so it’s all new to her, overlaid with a pall of grief and anxiety after the shock of her older brother’s death in Cairo. He reportedly died in a fall from the balcony of his room in the Ramses Sands Hotel. In the country on business, Eric was not yet forty and working for a boutique international arms supplier called Polaris. Egypt is one of Polaris’s best customers.

Back in New York before this trip, Eric’s death doesn’t sit right with Cate. She doesn’t believe the emerging official line that Eric committed suicide and insists on asking questions. She even enlists a retired forensic pathologist to examine his body. Defensive wounds. Injuries on both sides of his head, which a fall wouldn’t produce. Not to mention that his hotel room was only on the third floor. A fall from that height would likely be survivable. If you think Cate is becoming a little obsessed, you’ll also agree she has plenty of reason to be—especially when Polaris offers her family a multi-million-dollar settlement.

Thus, the trip to Egypt. She’s a fundraiser for an arts organization, not any sort of investigator, but what she lacks in experience she more than makes up for in motivation. Where to start that won’t get her in trouble? Let’s just say that she doesn’t need to go looking for it. From the moment she sets foot in the Cairo airport, it seems she’s in danger, and the pace of the novel never slackens.

Everyone seems to be lying to her, including Eric’s former work colleagues, his boss’s wife, the hotel staff, Eric’s embassy contact. It’s a cinch they’re not telling her everything. Cate stays busy finding people to interview and doesn’t spend much time sightseeing. But the sights and exoticism of Egypt are all around her. Her Grand Nile hotel is on the banks of one of the world’s longest and oldest rivers, which not only cleaves the country, it makes it possible. A few miles east or west is basically desert. To someone like Cate, who grew up in the sylvan Berkshire mountains of Western Massachusetts, the compression of so many people, so much living, and so much history into this narrow strip of land feels almost claustrophobic.

Bollen has an admirable literary writing style. He conveys ideas and feelings in ways that are both inventive and quite on point. From that standpoint and the fact that he’s willing to assume some cultural awareness on the part of his readers, the writing stands out. On the negative side, from time to time, he goes on too long with backstory.

I’ve been asking myself whether Cate is a plausible female protagonist. She’s certainly plucky and determined. Perfectly likeable. A little irrational, in that she broke up a good relationship back home through her own infidelity. But does she act like a woman would act when she wants information someone doesn’t want to share, or the way a woman would act in a tight situation? Or does she act more like a man with a woman’s name? I can’t put my finger on what bothers me about her, but just the fact that the question occurred to me makes me think she doesn’t exactly ring true, but it’s a small point in an otherwise well-conceived, extremely evocative thriller that respects the reader’s intellect. I liked it a lot.

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Loving the Long Creative Life

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Hong Kong (now U.S.) author Xu Xi has published essays, appeared in and published anthologies, and novels, including The Unwalled City: A Novel of Hong Kong. In sum, fifteen books. In an interview, she shared some thoughts about the creative life that would encourage authors, both aspiring and experienced. “Being a writer is also an issue if you’re not published” (or, perhaps, not published where you want to be). And it’s hard to break into U.S. literary journals, short story publishing, “never mind selling novels.”

Xu found that living in New York City, enough people were trying to be an artist of some kind—musician, painter, actor, novelist—that made life easier. They understood her. They understood her day job was just a way to put groceries on the table. This is a heartfelt validation of the importance of “community.” Some of us find it in groups of other writers. Some find it in groups outside the writing community.

Still, Xu had to reach a point where the daily demands on her were not primarily about relationships, family, and work, in order to be free to write beyond herself. She quotes Confucius’s description of the various decades of life, which culminate at the point that you can “follow [your] heart’s desire without overstepping the line.” Alas, the Master said that point comes when you reach an advanced age, which maybe is why we hear about authors (like me!) whose first book is published after age 50. Not that that’s a piece of cake, either.

Xu, who is past 50 herself says she thinks of writing “as fate, destiny, the thing you were born to do but didn’t know how to go about or weren’t quite ready for when you were younger.” Interestingly, in her day jobs she was considered a quick study, but she finds the process of writing, “incredibly slow.” Nevertheless, she finds pleasure in learning how to improve, which is long-term and yields incremental improvements. It’s fulfilling in a deep, “things are right with the world” sense, which more quickly mastered accomplishments often lack. How many times are authors pitched on “this book,” “this course,” or “this software” that will lead them down an immediate and short path to success?

International artists who write in English, Xu believes, are one way for readers to better understand both the universal aspects of life while appreciating differences in human experience and building empathy with people whose perspectives are different. This comes to the fore in her writer’s guide and anthology, The Art and Craft of Asian Stories.

At some point Xu realized she “could waste an enormous amount of creative time and energy on all kinds of ‘okay’ things, and, as well, produce work that might actually prove more readily publishable.” That choice would mean other work would suffer—work that require a deeper examination of our interior selves to reach for the fundamental, rather than the superficial. Such works don’t demand that you stretch your writing muscles. Xu is willing to do this and thereby is, she believes, writing to the future of the English language.

Xu Xi is the Jenks Chair in Contemporary Letters at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.