“I’m a very slow writer,” says Susan Choi. The author of Trust Exercise—the sly, dazzling novel that won her the 2019 National Book Award—thought she was done with Flashlight, a twisting excavation of memory and family, when she arrived at the Bogliasco Foundation in Italy for a month-long residency. She wasn’t. “As it turned out I did my last and most important rewrite of Flashlight at Bogliasco,” Choi says. The nearby ocean, the views, and the well-prepared lunches all helped. “At home I can always find something to distract me, like making myself lunch or shopping for groceries or planning future meals,” she says. “I devote a lot of time to food-related procrastination. At Bogliasco that was impossible because they were handling the food, so I had no choice but to write.” Between meals, Choi would sit herself at a small desk in the window of the ground floor.  “The window looked onto the villa’s gardens, which are built into the coast rocks and descend in these steep terraces straight to the water, and are also full of umbrella pines leaning this way and that. So the view was of the gardens, the pines, and below and beyond them, the Mediterranean. Pretty spectacular.”