[s]he was a compulsive pessimist, always looking for the soft brown spot in the fruit, pressing so hard she created it.

Over the centuries, and even today, the Bible and Christian theology have helped justify the Crusades, slavery, violence against gays, and the murder of doctors who perform abortions. The words themselves are latent, inert, harmless - until they aren't.

So the premise of 'The Submission' is that there's an anonymous competition to design a 9/11 memorial and it's won by an American Muslim, an architect born and raised in Virginia, and his name is Mohammad Khan.

Nothing in life gets dropped without someone else having to pick it up.

I wasn't sitting around years ago thinking I really want to write a novel.

I found 'The Twin' sitting on a coffee table at a writers' colony in 2009. It carried praise from J.M. Coetzee. That seemed ample justification for using it to avoid my own writing. I finished it - weeping - a day later, and I've been puzzling over its powerful hold on me ever since.

[s]he was a compulsive pessimist, always looking for the soft brown spot in the fruit, pressing so hard she created it.