Josip Novakovich teaches creative writing at Concordia University in Montreal and has published Infidelities: Stories of War and Lust (Harper Perennial, 2005), April Fool's Day (HarperCollins, 2004 (published in ten countries, including UK, Turkey, Poland, Switzerland, Italy, Russia, Hungary), two story collections, Yolk (Graywolf Press), and Salvation and Other Disasters (Graywolf Press), a collection of narrative essays, Apricots from Chernobyl (Graywolf Press), and has been anthologized in Best American Poetry (1997). He is working at becoming a citizen of his fourth country (Yugoslavia, Croatia, United States, and now Canada). The shopping has taken him to Canada.
You are 25 years old, and since college you’ve been shelving children’s books in a small Missouri library and living on the top floor of a theater, where you are…