"The Atlas," Sarajevo brochure extract — Sarajevo Tourist Association booklet, "Sarajevo, Yugoslavia: English" (Novi Sad: Munir Ras-idovic, 1985).
230 "The Adas," Lautreamont excerpt — Comte de Lautréamont, Maldoror and Poems, trans. Paul Knight (New York: Penguin, 1978), p. 281.
248—49
"The Atlas," first translation of Snow Country sentence — Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country, trans. Edward G. Seidensticker (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, Perigree Books, 1981; repr. of 1957 Knopf ed.), p. 3.
249
"The Atlas," second translation of Snow Country sentence — Yasunari Kawabata, Palm-of-the-Hand Stories, trans. Lane Dunlop and J. Martin Holman (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1988), p. 228 ("Gleanings from 'Snow Country' ").
249-50
Note: "Translations" of the Kawabata sentence on these pages are mine.
320
"The Hill of Gold," Masada section, "The mind of the righteous": — New Oxford version, Proverbs 15:28.
324
"The Hill of Gold," Masada section, Judith's words — Apocrypha, New Oxford Version, Judith 8:16.
333
"Disappointed by the Wind" — Walter Benjamin, Moscow Diary, ed. Gary Smith, trans. Richard Sieburth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 6 (letter to Martin Buber).
379
"Fortune-Tellers," Sphere of Stars section, Coptic text — James M. Robinson, ed., The Nag Hammadi Library in English, 3rd rev. ed. (Harper San Francisco, 1990), "The Concept of Our Great Power" (VI, 4), p. 313.
408
"The Street of Stares," third section, "I look on the blacks as a set of monkeys ..." — M. F. Christie, Aborigines in Colonial Victoria 1835— 86 (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1979), p. 45, quoted in Eve Mumewa D. Fesl, Conned! (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1993), p. 64.
431
"Say It with Flowers" — When I returned to that bar a year later, the woman with ten husbands was still there. It was night. She clutched me fiercely like a bird of prey and drew me in, shrilly and threateningly cawing entreaties. The place was full of men and terrifying laughter. The next year, no one I knew worked there.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Author's Note
"Opening the Book," the New York section of "Cowbells," "Lunch," "Charity," the New York section of "Five Lonely Nights," and "What's Your Name?" first appeared (in more or less that order) in the 1994 special New York issue of Grand Street.
"The Back of My Head" first appeared in an abbreviated form in The Los Angeles Times Magazine in 1992. This story, along with all of this book's other 1992 pieces set in ex-Yugoslavia (except for "Where You Are Today"), was part of four BBC Radio 4 broadcasts which I made in Berlin in 1992 called "The Yugoslav Notes." (The Yugoslavia pieces in The Atlas are accompaniments to the sections "Where Are All the Pretty Girls?" and "It's Not a War" in my essay "Rising Up and Rising Down"). I am happy now to restore "The Back of My Head" to its original form.
"An Old Man in Old Grayish Kamiks" was first presented (in abridged form) in 1994 in a BBC radio program entided "Four Corners."
"The Prophet of the Road" first appeared in The Los Angeles Times Magazine in 1992.
The San Diego section of "Houses" first appeared in Larry McCaftery's anthology Avant-Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation [Boulder: Black Ice Books (Fiction Collective Two), 1993).
"Under the Grass" first appeared in 1994 in Grand Street, minus the final "Roma" section which they did not care for.
"The Best Way to Smoke Crack" first appeared in a Japanese translation in the magazine Subaru.
The "Traveller's Epitaph" in "The Atlas" first appeared in Zyzzyva.
"Red and Blue" first appeared in Spin in 1994 in a slightly abbreviated form.
"The Best Way-to Drink Beer" first appeared in Esquire in 1994 under their title, "How to Drink Beer."
The first paragraph of "Resolute Bay, Cornwallis Island, Canada (1991)" in "Incarnations of the Murderer" was originally a part of a BBC radio program I presented entitled "Are You Spies from Greenpeace?" (January 1992). "Incarnations of the Murderer" as a whole first appeared in the electronic anthology Post-Modem Culture. The version herein has been revised and expanded.
"Outside and Inside" first appeared in a shorter version in Conjunctions.
"The Rifles" was first published in Grand Street.
"Last Day at the Bakery" first appeared in Story magazine in 1994.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Reed International Books for permission to reproduce the following from Philips' International Atlas: A Series of 160 Pages of Coloured Maps and Plans Forming a Complete Geographical Survey of the International Relationships of the New Era, Its Territorial Changes and Commercial Communications, Third Edition, edited by George Philip, F.R.G.S., George Philip & Son, Ltd, The London Geographical Institute, 1937: Rainfall, Isobars and Winds; Flags of All Nations; and North Polar Regions - South Polar Regions.
Photographs by the author.
The Atlas Page 49