Invisible Beasts is a strange and beautiful meditation on love and seeing, a hybrid of fantasy and field guide, novel and essay, treatise and fable. With one hand it offers a sad commentary on environmental degradation, while with the other it presents a bright, whimsical, and funny exploration of what it means to be human. It's wonderfully written, crazily imagined, and absolutely original.

I've been getting into Nick Drake lately, the folk singer. Sad, gorgeous stuff.

We live through books; we have adventures in them, we lead alternative lives through them. We expand our memories through them. And that sometimes art can offer us more intense experiences of the world than life itself can.

My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness.

I feel like it has gone very fast for me, but I feel like it wasn't instantaneous, at all. I was getting a lot of rejections. I just got very lucky and it happened quickly for me. I don't feel like I'm a prodigy or something.

I write reviews of science books for the Boston Globe, so I like to give science books.

For me, writing historical fiction is all about finding a balance between reading, traveling, looking, imagining, and dreaming.