From Chicago out of Pakistan, Afzal has been devoted to literature, to American literature in particular, since arriving here at the age of 19 in the 1960s. He came to study electrical engineering, but he was transfixed by women, baseball, literature… From the works of writers like Bernard Malamud, John Fowles, Albert Camus and many others, he took what he needed to become a writer himself. His novels and short stories, and his long editorship of the Chicago Quarterly Review, which he founded in 1994, come from that fascination with and devotion to the writer’s voice. His own voice is unique and profoundly wrought. We are pleased to have presented him, and to offer this video of an evening in his company with his friends and colleagues Elizabeth McKenzie, the novelist and Afzal’s co-editor at the Review, and Moazzam Sheikh, a writer of novels and stories and Afzal’s publisher at Weavers Press.