I stayed eight years, then spent a year in Pakistan and two back in the U.S.

'When I was 21, I went to Paris and fell in love with an Argentinean man.

'I've had quite a few expatriate experiences,' she said, speaking by phone from her apartment in Buenos Aires. That city is one Swann happens to know well, since she's lived in Argentina since 2003. Daisy, a recently divorced American, and Isolde, a socially ambitious European, meet up with Argentine Leonarda while living in Buenos Aires. That is not to say she's writing about the same characters, or even similar ones-rather, that the three women in this book are exploring their own power, too. Take Maya and Roe, add a decade or so, and you have the characters of Swann's latest novel, The Foreigners (Riverhead Books). Her 2003 debut, Serious Girls, put Maxine Swann on the literary map as a serious novelist author Mary Gordon called it 'a small masterpiece.' The story of two teenagers, Maya and Roe, who are trying to live 'interesting lives,' the book details their odysseys toward identity, but remembers something that too many writers forget when creating young female characters: women of any age, just like men, are interested in power and learning how to wield whatever amount of it that they have. Yossarian Lives! - Robert Gray, contributing editor, Shelf Awareness They read: 'YOSSARIAN LIVES.' And he confided he'd been pasting these stickers secretly on the walls of the corridors and in the executive rest rooms of the NBC building.' I'm reading Catch-22 again. In an introduction to a new edition of Catch-22 a dozen years ago, Heller recalled that after an appearance on the Today Show in 1962, he met journalist John Chancellor, the program's interim host, at a bar near the studio, where 'he handed me a packet of stickers he'd had printed privately. a dazzling performance' that 'may make its author famous.' And so it has. Chris Cox confessed in the Guardian he had owned a copy for years before finally opening it: 'So did I really need to bother reading it at this late stage? Well, having arrived 50 years late to the party, I'm pleased to finally be able to answer that question with a wide-eyed, emphatic, rapturous yes.' The original New York Times review was appropriately chaotic, calling the book 'not even a good novel by conventional standards,' while praising it for being 'wildly original, brilliantly comic, brutally gruesome.

The anniversary has also inspired people to read the novel for the first time. It always helps me understand the way the world works. I don't re-read many books, but I've gone back to this one often over the years. Joseph Heller's brilliant satirical war novel Catch-22 is 50 years old this week, yet seems remarkably young, fit and sharp-tongued for its age. There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were immediate was the process of a rational mind.

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