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

But there had to be a quota. An upper limit to the number of miracles one is privileged to in a lifetime. How many times can a beloved reappear?

From personal experience, I completely agree that it is often easier to go for monotone sadness. When I was starting out, I wrote a gazillion short stories that ran the gamut of human suffering - drug addiction, child abuse, terminal illness, loved ones dying by all manner of misfortune, etc. In hindsight, it's clear that I mistook the power of the situation for the power of the story.

In my own work, humor is necessary, for the reasons stated above, but also because forbidding your characters silliness, absurdity, irony, and vulgarity forbids them aspects of the human experience every bit as universal as sorrow.

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.

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

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.