When I was 13, my family moved from a suburb of New York City to Miami, Florida, and we moved there the Friday before Labor Day weekend.
From Chris Bohjalian
I live here in Vermont, in a village of barely a thousand people halfway up the state's third highest mountain.
As a novelist, there are three phone calls you never expect to receive in your lifetime because if you waited for them you would grow despairing - one calling from Stockholm with a Swedish accent, one from the NBA, and one from Oprah Winfrey.
What is most important to me is that my narrator's voice is believable, and that, though it is clearly an absolute fiction, it has the emotional resonance of memoir.
I'm half-Armenian. Even though my grandparents did not discuss the genocide, and my father - like many sons and daughters of immigrants - wanted to be as 'American' as possible, I was always aware of it. How could I not be?
My wife and I would be very comfortable having a baby at home or using one of the terrific nurse-midwives at the hospital.
I do have hobbies - I garden and bike, for example - but there's nothing in the world that gives me even a fraction of the pleasure that I derive from hanging around with my wife and daughter.
If you look at my personal library, you will notice that it ranges from Henry James to Steig Larsson, from Margaret Atwood to Max Hastings. There's Jane Austen and Tom Perrotta and volumes of letters from Civil War privates. It's pretty eclectic.
My grandparents, like many genocide survivors, took most of their stories to their graves.
The reality is that most of North America knows next to nothing of the 20th century's first genocide - the systematic slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians in the First World War.
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