The Sweet & the Salt, The Sun, StoryQuarterly, Sonora Review, South Dakota Review, Confrontation, Nimrod, The Long Goodbye, Angelina and Me, Highway 1, Unchain My Heart, The Girl in the Picture, Dorado, The Sweet and the Salt, Shark Lore, Hibakusha, the Restaurant of American Dishes, Don-gonh, John Biguenet
selected stories
"This story broke my heart. It's awfully hard to write about people who are so disenfranchised and make it feel real, but this story does so in a way that feels effortless. The fear and the pain and, above that, the courage and resilience of the narrator shook me up, in precisely the way I want a story to. I was reminded of the work of Daniel Mason and Zora Neale Hurston."
— Steve Almond, author of My Life in Heavy Metal and The Evil B. B. Chow
"This is a voice which needs to be heard; very elegant prose."
—John Biguenet
Author of The Torturer’s Apprentice: Stories and Oyster
Click on links below to read excerpts
About “The Sweet and the Salt”
February 11, 2010
The Writer Career Arc, or Why We Love the Susan Boyle Story
The Millions, February 2010
The idea is that the reader is interested in a rags-to-riches story, as if literary success were akin to winning the lottery, or better yet, being struck by lightning.
March 12, 2010
Unaccommodated Man: Robert Stone’s Fun With Problems
The Millions, March 2010
"We had achieved the dream of all fans, the conflation of the author with his creation, which we secretly believed to be the same thing all along."
selected essays
April 30, 2010
Legacy of a Photo: Kim Phuc, Vietnam Napalm Girl
Originally published in The Millions, April 30, 2010
(Warning: Images accompanying article are graphic in nature and not suitable for all audiences.)
July 15, 2010
Loneliness, Love and Hemingway
Essay done for the When We Fell In Love Series on the great blog, 3 Guys, 1 Book.
Authors tell about the books in their lives that turned them into readers and writers.
Originally published on 3 Guys, 1 Book
July 15, 2010
"I’m sure that I was exposed to Hemingway in school, as a necessary and dreaded English assignment, but reading him left no impression other than he was a chore to be gotten through. Then I turned seventeen, fell in love and promptly got my heart broken (big time), and suddenly Ernest Hemingway became my best and closest friend."
August 5, 2010
Originally published at
War Through the Generations
I had always been fascinated by the Vietnam war, primarily because it seemed a thing that could not be understood—the closer you approached its various parts, the more the whole moved away from you. As a child surrounded by the urgency of war at NATO and then Fort Ord, it was clear the war was something frightening and bad, and in the way of children I associated the very name of the place—Vietnam—with that pain and evil. The problem was that when I grew up and read about the politics of the war, when I read the non-fiction accounts of soldiers in that war, my understanding did not gain in depth. I understood that war was hell, but I did not understand what we had learned from the experience, and as history seemed to repeat itself in other foreign conflicts, those places became new Vietnams, more places of pain and evil.
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