LA Times Off the Shelf Feature: Reality, Fantasy, and the Imagination

(What if you looked through the hole in the pipe and saw this?)The Los Angeles Times ran my essay about Finch on Friday. Very happy with how it turned out. An excerpt:

When I was growing up, my dad had a family heirloom that fascinated me: a small tobacco pipe with a glass-covered pinhole in the side. If you looked through the hole you could see a microfiche-like photograph: four rows of stern-looking men and women, along with names and other information in German or Dutch. My dad explained that the photograph depicted a group of dissidents from the days before World War I. He didn't know whether the image was intended as a "hit list" for the secret police or a way for the radicals to keep track of their own. But those kinds of details didn't register with me anyway. For me, the pipe was a compelling oddity, a window that delighted me because I could look through a tiny hole and see so much.

I'll be reading from Finch at Book Soup on the Sunset Strip on November 11 at 7pm.