Barnaby Sandwich has left New York three times: once to see fireworks at Grand Army Plaza, once to go to the Transit Museum in Downtown Brooklyn, and once on a school trip to the Bronx Botanic Garden. But despite his limited travel, he is very interested in foreigners—he knows a lot of them, and in fact, his own great-grandfather was one, who came all the way from White Russia. In tribute to this man’s natty ascot—and to the crumbs of hard-boiled egg that clung to the natty ascot—someone at Ellis Island nicknamed him “the Oil of Sandwich,” and Sandwich bequeathed this name to his patrilineal descendants.

Barney is particularly interested in foreign books because, as he understands it, they are not written in English, but in other languages altogether, and then have to be translated. The exact purpose of this complicated procedure remains occult to him; and it is partially in the hope of learning why everyone doesn’t write in English in the first place that Sandwich has decided to attend the PEN American Center’s Foreign Something-Whatever festival. (His other partial hope is of meeting a pretty foreign girl with uncorrected teeth who doesn’t buy into American standards of masculine fitness.)