Henry Bromell is an old friend of Knopf's. We published his collection of short stories twenty years ago, when both Henry and I were new to publishing: Henry, a young, award-winning novelist and short story writer (his first novel The Slightest Distance won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award; his stories then appearing regularly in The New Yorker); I, a young editor at Alfred A. Knopf. Henry's contract was for two books -- a collection of stories and a novel. After we published the collection Henry moved west. He began a new life and disappeared from mine. I never cancelled the contract. I knew Henry would reappear somewhere down the line, manuscript in hand.

One day twenty years later . . . the phone rang. It was Henry. He had written a novel and wanted to know if I would like to read it. Of course, I said.

Henry had been living in Los Angeles, writing, producing, and directing for television. "Northern Exposure," "I'll Fly Away," "Homicide: Life on the Streets," and "Chicago Hope."

He sent along his manuscript. Henry's book was one of the most interesting and resonant novels I'd read in a long time. It was a novel that existed on many levels. It was a novel about the cold war, and those who were destroyed in its wake; about a father and son trying to connect; about history and what happens inside of it. Little America had the quality of one of Graham Greene's early novels.