Stories

Volume 14 of the Chicago Quarterly Review is now available at Amazon. In it is “An Opera of War,” a short story about an Italian soldier who, shortly after the Second World War, is forced to face his crimes when he takes a job in an opera.

The Deleted Line: a survivor of the Battle of Okinawa seeks vengeance over a line edited from a history book. The story is available in My Postwar Life: new writings from Japan and Okinawa (edited by Elizabeth McKenzie). Buy the anthology at Amazon, BN.com, or Indiebound.org. Read the Japan Times review of My Postwar Life here. About The Deleted Line, reviewer Stephen Mansfield writes: “fact is the inspiration for fiction, as a single sentence — ‘it is possible that mass suicides and killings took place among the residents’ — stands for the lengths a government will go to modify the truth.”

Killing the Man: a young hit man gets to know his target by reading his book.

The Boy and the Lioness: an American art history student becomes involved with art smuggling in Iraq.

Also, Dawn Conversation on the Boulevard, the first short story I published. I wrote it at a sidewalk café in Rabat, Morocco, in 1997, after getting off a night bus. ACM (Another Chicago Magazine) published it in 1999.