Great Regulars: I remember sitting in that bookstore,

wondering if anyone would come to a reading on such an evening, looking out at the quiet twilight, at the traffic on the Sunset Strip. I felt dissolute, disconnected. I didn't know how to respond. Once I had lived in the shadow of the World Trade Center, had eaten lunch in its plaza and relied on it to orient myself when I got out of the subway, but on this uneasy evening in West Hollywood, all that seemed a very long time ago.

If you had asked me then, what I would have told you was that this felt like the moment New York disappeared for me.

from David Ulin: Granta: 9/11, Ten Years Later: The Art of Moving On

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Indeed, to read "The 9/11 Commission Report" is to read what is almost a classic narrative, with heroes (counter-terrorism expert Richard Clarke, for one, and the passengers of United 93, who prevented what may have been an attack on the White House or the Capitol) and villains, with overlapping plot lines and tragic flaws. There are missed connections, disastrous betrayals, ambition and arrogance and hubris on every side. Most important, there is an authority to the language, not only in regard to the story it is telling but also in the way that it is told.

from David Ulin: The Los Angeles Times: Critic's Notebook: In pursuit of the great 9/11 book

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