When David Bezmozgis, BA’96, published his short story collection, Natasha and Other Stories, in 2004, the result was, in veteran critic Robert Fulford’s words, a “one-man shock-and-awe invasion of North American literature.”

The first-time author experienced almost every perk associated with being a literary sensation – rapturous reviews (in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere), prizes (the Danuta Gleed Literary Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, to name two) – pretty much everything except for a spot on the couch next to Oprah.

The author himself happily traces his recent success as an author to his days as a Lit major at McGill.

“From McGill, you can just connect the dots to most of the important events that happened to me in regards to my writing,” says Bezmozgis from the jumble of his home in Toronto, currently undergoing major renovations.

When connected, the dots follow the dizzying path of an unknown author who became the talk of New York literary circles almost overnight. Of course, like most “overnight” success stories, Bezmozgis’s was years in the making and is a classic tale of one part talent and one part being in the right place at the right time.

Taking a postmodernism class as an undergraduate at McGill, Bezmozgis was captivated by Water Music, a novel by maverick American writer T.C. Boyle. A few years later, while doing his MA in film at the University of Southern California, Bezmozgis signed up for a writing class led by the iconoclastic author. Boyle was impressed with his student’s fiction and introduced Bezmozgis to Leonard Michaels, another U.S. literary icon. Michaels befriended the young Canadian, and was pivotal in Bezmozgis signing a book deal with Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2002.

In May 2003, Bezmozgis scored a most unlikely hat trick for a novice author – placing stories from his soon-to-be-released collection in Zoetrope: All Story, Harper’s and the New Yorker, the Holy Trinity of North American magazines for fiction writers. “My agent called it the trifecta,” Bezmozgis laughs.

That magical May made Bezmozgis the poster boy for rookie writers everywhere and created a pre-release buzz for Natasha that was unparalleled in an industry notorious for letting short story collections rot on the shelves unless the last name on the cover is Munro.

Natasha is rooted in reality. Toronto serves as the backdrop for the seven linked stories that follow the Bermans, a family of immigrants from Latvia who do their best to fit into their strange new world, as did the author’s own family during the exodus of Soviet Jews in 1980.

Indeed, the fictional family members share many similarities with their real-life counterparts, including living at the same address, attending the same schools and working the same jobs. Although fictionalized, “the context of stories is based on experiences either my family has had, or people in the community have had,” says Bezmozgis. “One of my motivations was to represent this community which, up to that point, really hadn’t been represented.”

Not even 180 pages long, Bezmozgis’s slender book nonetheless packs a major wallop. “Taken alone,” declared the Library Journal, “these stories are charming and pitch-perfect; together, they add up to something like life itself: funny, heartbreaking, terrible, true.” “Natasha became a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award and is currently in the running for CBC Radio’s Canada Reads competition.”

Bezmozgis was busy at Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute this past summer, fine-tuning a film project he hopes to direct. “It is set in Toronto in 1988 and, much like Natasha, deals in part with a family of Soviet Jews.”

He is also working on a new novel. “I keep writing because there are still stories I’d like to tell and I can’t resist the challenge of trying to tell them,” he says. “When I no longer feel that way, I’ll stop.”

Although the future stretches brightly before him, Bezmozgis doesn’t forget the path he’s travelled to get there.

“I look back at my four years at McGill as maybe the four best years of my life,” he says. “When I was in high school I didn’t really have a community that I found interesting – at McGill I did. I co-edited [the student film journal] Montage, I got into the McGill theatre scene and was given the opportunity to read and be exposed to other voices and ideas. I think the benefits of that for me were incalculable.”