From Russia (without smileys)

By the time my grandchildren go to school smileys are bound to be a generally accepted form of punctuation, I mused, and kids will learn to use emoticons along with colons, hyphens, and apostrophes.
With these thoughts fresh in my mind, I logged into my mail account and saw there was a message from the translator Will Firth. He wrote that the web magazine Words without Borders had decided to publish my short story “Traders.” I was greatly surprised and searched for a smiley in his mail to tell if this was perhaps a practical joke. There was no smiley.
The reason for my surprise was that I’d always felt “Traders” to be a highly personal story. It’s a snapshot of a very specific phase in Russian history and I’d thought it would be incomprehensible to people outside Russia—in fact, incomprehensible to anyone who wasn’t in Russia and young at the time.