Visible World

'My mother knew a man during the war. Theirs was a love story, and like any good love story, it left blood on the floor and wreckage in its wake.' As a boy growing up in New York, the narrator's parents' memories of their Czech homeland seem to belong to another world, as distant and unreal as the fairy tales his father tells him. It is only as an adult, when he makes his own journey to Prague, that he is finally able to piece together the truth of his parents' past: what they did, whom his mother loved, and why they were never able to forget.

MARK SLOUKA's short fiction has featured in Best American Short Stories and has been awarded a National Magazine Award for Fiction. He is a Contributing Editor at Harper's, and the author of The Woodcarver's Tale and God's Fool (Knopf and Picador). He is Professor of English Literature at the University of Chicago.