I keep fat books on my bedside table for the nights I can't sleep and thin books for the nights I can, when I'm too tired for more than a page or two. In fact I fall asleep easily so the fat books never get read. They exist as pure potential or myths, the Loch Ness monsters of the books I own. I may never read them but it's important to know they're there in case I ever do, but I won't. Meanwhile the thin books never get finished because I can't remember what I read the night before and I end up starting again, every night in the same place, falling asleep after two pages. I should stick to TV. Anyway, here are my poor neglected bedside books:

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Influential comic creator Harvey Pekar passed away early in the morning of July 12th at his Cleveland, Ohio home. A Harvey Award winner in 1995 for his graphic novel Our Cancer Year, Pekar got his start in comics in 1976, collaborating with celebrated underground cartoonist R. Crumb to begin American Splendor. The title would continue over many years and at many publishers; 2003 saw an Academy Award nominated movie based on Pekar's life and work, in which actor Paul Giamatti assumed the role of Pekar. Harvey Pekar's recent work included the graphic novel The Quitter, illustrated by Dean Haspiel and an adaptation of Stud Terkel's Working.

To many people, Central Asia is a far-off part of the world that conjures up images of the fabled cities of Samarkand and Bukhara, the wild exploits of Tamerlane, and the legendary Silk Route. It was also the site of Stalin's cruelest deportations, and more recently, the site of political unrest.

By a quirk of history, my parents were born (around 1900) in the beautiful, fertile Talas Valley of Kyrgyzstan, one of the countries in the area of Central Asia formerly known as Turkestan. In 1929, when confronted with Soviet land reform and facing loss of life or deportation, my parents fled the country of their birth-consequently sojourning in five other countries. They grieved the loss of their cherished homeland until the end of their days.

We, their children, were born in three different continents and lived in our respective countries only a few years. Consequently, the meaning of a homeland held little significance for us. What made Kyrgyzstan so special for our parents? I was determined to find out and listened to the stories the relatives told who left Kyrgyzstan seventy years later. The result is my book Six Sugar Beets - Five Bitter Years (2003), the story of my aunt who survived the Stalin era. I travelled and I taught in Bishkek, the capital city of Kyrgyzstan and wrote Sheer Survival: From Brazil to Kyrgyzstan (2007), my memoir and the writings of my parents. It was a delight to translate the biography of my relative Hermann Jantzen who spent most of his years in Kyrgyzstan-my book In the Wilds of Turkestan (2009).

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My nightstand is rich with short story collections-and why wouldn't it be? Bedtime is the best time for short fiction, which can pack a satisfying wallop without the risk of keeping you up all night.

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