When I came to America, I was already a writer, already published in Bosnia. I was planning to go back, but I had no choice but to stay here after the civil war, so I enrolled at Northwestern in a master's program and studied American literature.
I've immersed myself in reading more and more of American literature, but no editor has asked me to comment on Jonathan Franzen or Jennifer Egan. It is assumed I'm an expert on writers who need a little less suntan lotion at the beach.
It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave.
It would be hard to exaggerate Ernest Hemingway's influence over American literature, but his influence on our lives is probably larger still.
My enthusiasm for L.A. stems from my father, who was a lecturer in American literature at the University of Birmingham. Through his work, our family did several house swaps with L.A. families. It was a dreadfully daring thing to do in the early 1980s; there was no Internet, so you had no idea of what you were getting into.
Since 'Huckleberry Finn,' or thereabouts, it seemed that all American literature was about the alienated hero.
I hope someday to see California literature become a part of mainstream American literature, and I hope to be part of that process.
I've been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.
As an undergraduate I majored in British and American literature at Rice University.
In college, I started to get soaked in the materials. Subsequently, I worked with R.W.B. Lewis, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks on a history of American literature - I did that for seven or eight years. In the course of that work, my interest in Faulkner deepened and has been sustained ever since.
