"The two that I feel I have most responded to, and probably because they have lived through, and been inspired by, times of crisis, are Chekhov and Babel...when I had accepted my immigrant status in the New World, the energy and the brashness and the art of compression of The Odessa Tales by Isaac Babel even more forcefully. Chekhov and Babel were formative authors for me, but not models. Because in the seventies, eighties, and even early nineties, I was writing about North American residents who hadn't yet been written of too much in American fiction, I had to improvise a form. Babel's art of compression appealed to me. The art of compression is not minimalism. It's the exact opposite of minimalism. What I learned from Babel's stories is that you can pack in thirty kinds of emotional and linguistic nuances into one clause and thirty different historical, political conflicts and concessions into one paragraph."