An Afghanistan Picture Show: Or, How I Saved the World

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“Bill’s come a long way from An Afghanistan Picture Show,” said an editor to my agent in the course of rejecting my latest book; so far as he was concerned, I must not have come far enough. Never mind that I could say the same about him; for when I look back on the product of sincerity and gaucherie which you are now reading, I believe in both his propositions. As it stands, An Afghanistan Picture Show is a much delayed revision and amplification of the very first book I wrote, which was not the first book I published. As such, it suffers deficiencies of both form and content. One of my German translators recently told me: “An Afghanistan Picture Show is your weakest book, in my opinion. I hope you don’t mind my saying that.” Indeed, I do not. First of all, I had just begun to teach myself how to write. It takes years to learn how to observe, when to make a sentence terse or flowery, and which questions to write. The book’s attempts at humor and whimsicality embarrass me, although some of its irony still entertains me.

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