David Ebershoff

Who are we? Whom do we want to become? How do we perceive ourselves? How do we want to be perceived? These questions of identity are often at the core of our own internal struggles. Resolve them, and you are closer to being free.

I usually don't throw around the word 'fabulous,' but how else to describe buildings decorated with mirrored water dragons, serpents tiled in colored glass, and hundreds - no, thousands, no, tens of thousands - of gold-leaf Buddhas? Luang Prabang has more than 47,000 residents, but its Buddha population must be ten times that.

I first read 'The Scarlet Letter' when I was fifteen. In it, I found a familiar vision of religious intolerance to the one around me. I grew up in the 1980s, when televangelists, with their fluffed up hair and their tears, self-righteously denounced all kinds of sinners, reserving a special, full-throated enthusiasm for gay people.

Events are moving so fast and what in one moment seems impossible, the next is happening. I'm sure historians will, in time, provide theories and analysis, but for now I think most of us simply want the tide stemmed.