And furthermore did you know that behind the discovery of America there was a Jewish financier?

The process hasn't changed, but the writer has developed. I still get up every morning and go to work.

A novel may take anywhere from two to five years to write and, in the end, you might manage a couple of thousand dollars on it, no more.

And furthermore did you know that behind the discovery of America there was a Jewish financier?

Mr. Bernard died on a Monday, at the age of seventy-five, his body wasted. He lay in state for two days in the lobby of the Bernard Gursky Tower and, as he failed to rise on the third, he was duly buried.

Fiorito has all the right stuff. His splendid memoir about his relationship with his dying father belongs on that small shelf with Philip Roth's Patrimony and Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes.

Wherever I travel I'm too late. The orgy has moved elsewhere.