A Life in Men is a joyful, ambitious novel that is also an adventure traversing three continents, as well as a meditation on love, sex, and, most important, friendship, which can overcome time, distance, and even death.

In a regular class I don't focus on the form, but I think that focus is helpful for brainstorming and coming up with ideas quickly, especially with autobiographical material.

I've worked behind counters serving food, and I've lived on the circus train, and I've led bicycle tours in Eastern Europe and the Balkans and Russia. I've been a key liner for a newspaper, I've done typesetting. Oh, all sorts of things.

I'm pro-life, in the sense that chaos seems like life to me and order seems like death.

That's where I live, a junkyard in a neighborhood of junkyards. We have three tractors from the 1940s and '50s, several old pickup trucks, and a pile of scrap metal.

I thought that you had to learn to write by yourself and if you couldn't do it, then you were out of luck.

A mathematical proof is beautiful, but when you're finished, it's really only about one thing. A story can be about many things.