You are a coward,' she said, and with that one word wrote a denunciation, a biography, and a prophecy.

The short story that eventually grew into Constellation was the first fiction set in Russia that I'd ever written, and that was right around the time I was giving up on a doomed, never-to-be-seen first novel. While I saw it could be something bigger, in hindsight fortuitous timing was as responsible as anything.

We twist our souls around each other’s miseries.

My work often begins as little internal dares, wondering if I can pull something off. So I spent a few years drawing these stories together, trying to build a Pangea of what began as separate continents.

Entire years had passed when he was rich enough in time to disregard the loose change of a minute, but now he obsessed over each one, this minute, the next minute, the one following, all of which were different terms for the same illusion.

She wanted to hold foreign syllables like mints on her tongue until they dissolved into fluency.

Perhaps our deepest love is already inscribed within us, so its object doesn't create a new word but instead allows us to read the one written.