Bruce Duffy is the author of the critically acclaimed The World As I Found It, a fictional life of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Last Comes the Egg. His first novel, World, was rereleased this year in the New York Review of Books Classics series. He has reported on such places as Haiti, Bosnia, and Taliban Afghanistan. In researching this book, he also traveled to Rimbaud’s town Harar, and to the still lawless desert tribal lands near Somalia. He has three children, Lily, Kate, and Sam, and he lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with his wife, Susan Segal, a psychotherapist.