Hard to know what to read in her expression when Vira smiled at me. She was the soul of discretion, although I detected in the looks she gave me a wryness that was both indulgence and chastisement, encouragement and a finger-wagging disapproval.

The High Castle

The unexpected, bittersweet pleasure of a letter or an e-mail whose sender you haven’t heard from in years. The serendipity of a chance meeting in the street, its loud-laughed happiness, the unguarded, guileless desire to embrace...

Some Reflections Occasioned by the Publication of the Revised Edition of the Practical Chinese Reader

The train ride from Amsterdam to Berlin is about six hours long. When I left Amsterdam to go travelling again, I realized while I was sitting on the train that I’d lost count of how many times I’d made that trip. 

The Train from Amsterdam

When the offensive came, I was reminded of Mahmiin Andeyin’s words to me the previous winter: “Before the summer comes, they will start bombing again.”


In the East

A few years ago, my dad came to visit me while I was living in France.

Gu Père

Book Review of The Applicant

There were two islands visible from the shore, and the larger of these was Chatakdal.

A Contested Island

Book Review of Mouth to Mouth

Book Review of Last Summer in the City

On Monday, I went for lunch at a vegetarian restaurant in Lviv that I used to go to last year and ran into S___, a waitress I knew from that time.

JG

Selected work