Zadie Smith was riding on the success of her debut novel White Teeth in 2001. By strange circumstance, she met Italian publishers Marco Cassini and Martina Testa during a literary festival in Mantova. Cassini and Testa ran a publishing house from home and one of the manuscripts they were working on was a collection of US fiction writers exploring what it meant to be an American citizen. David Foster Wallace once described it as “a stomach level sadness... a kind of lostness (sic).” Smith took this original collection and pitched it to Penguin, with her own words as a new introduction. By 2003, The Burned Children of America was released, including Dave Eggers, Jonathan Safran Foer, Myla Goldberg, and David Foster Wallace, all of whom were either already on their way or went on to major literary success...