Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language, and Loss Book

I didn't encounter much success in terms of books yesterday. It was a nice trip to Nashville. I enjoyed the conversation, which I need to stress was relaxed and intermittent. There was also an excellent barbecue turkey. Oh, and the music. I satisfied my interest in hillbilly music with some cool acquisitions but I didn't find a haul of interesting books there was The Novel: A Biography and this. Not much else. I picked this up and imagined my wife would find it interesting. She did. After sighing at the stack of CDs I had purchased she grabbed this slim tome and sat and read Simic's piece. I then read that one first so we could discuss such. I then spent a frigid January morning with the other four installments on exile, memory and using a language that isn't your "native" one -- whatever that means. I was duly impressed by Aciman's and will immediately read his memoir Out of Egypt. I wasn't as impressed by Hoffman's as it was overly political and did appear a touch dated (all of these pieces were commissioned in the late 1990s) but matters ended strong with sequential stellar provocations by Mukherjee, Said and Simic.