Iman Mersal

Delivered Youssef to the place in Maine. I say “the place,” because I don’t know how to describe it. Is it a camp? A hospital? An asylum?

There’s a kind of intense curiosity that possesses us when we encounter an author who is truly unknown — a branch cut from the tree with no date of birth or death in evidence — or when their writing offers no clues to the wider life of their generation, to their close friends or literary influences.