KGB Bar

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M. THOMAS GAMMARINO has an MFA in creative writing from the New School and is pursuing a PhD in English at the University of Hawaii. In 2000-01, he was a Fulbright Fellow in creative writing at Kyoto’s Doshisha University. Some of his recent fiction and essays have appeared in The New York Tyrant, The Adirondack Review, Word Riot and Noö Journal, and his story “The Fridge” was selected for inclusion in Dzanc Books’ Best of the Web 2009 Anthology. Big in Japan: A Ghost Story is his first novel.

Xiaoda Xiao was arrested in 1971 for tearing a poster of Mao and was sentenced to a five-year prison term as a counterrevolutionary. As a result, he spent the next seven years in a prison labor reform brigade on an island in Taihu Lake in Jiangsu province. He came to Amherst, MA, where he lives with his wife, in the spring of 1989 shortly before the break-out of the democratic movement in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. He has published stories based on his prison experience during the last years of Mao’s regime in China in various magazines in the U.S., among them, The Atlantic Monthly.