Celebrity Chekhov

When a man in the audience asked [Charles] Yu if the pistol he referred to in the novel is "Chekhov's gun," Yu is at first dumbfounded. "I guess it could be," he stammered. After the questioner clarified a bit—explaining Anton Chekhov's rule that if a gun is mentioned at the beginning of a story, it will have to be fired by the end—Yu laughed and shook his head. "I thought you were talking about Chekov from Star Trek," he said, relieved.

—Paul Constant, The Slog

N.B.: The original title of this post was: "Who are Yu?"

"That's what they say about the summer..."

The National Post has a summer reading pick...Personal Days by Ed Park!

And The Stranger's Paul Constant writes: "[P]ark's love of language elevates the novel to that rarest of levels: the vocabulary becomes almost another character in the story. Every word belongs exactly where it is."

Heyyy I'll take it...

See Ed (moi) read on Thursday, July 31, at KGB!