Each discipline has the capacity to be interested in politics, and each would ask different questions of what politics is, what constitutes power, how power is maintained, how it circulates, how relationships are formed, how institutions are built, how they fall. Every discipline would answer those questions in different ways.

I wrote Baghdad Central right after translating a great work by Ibrahim al-Koni, who is sort of a master of Arab fiction. In conversations with him I realized that translations have been my MFA program. If I have learned how to write fiction it's by working with great writers and getting them to explain their craft to me so that I can do it in English. That's how I've figured it out.

Translated books rarely get reviewed in the press. Books or poems or works of art that don't seem to have a corresponding style or figure or theme, obviously they're hard to digest.

Take Ezra Pound's translations of poetry from Chinese. He doesn't really know Chinese, and the very strange results that he comes up with aren't all successful, but as a whole it's incredibly successful, moving us away from familiar forms and indicating other forms we might think in or express in.

So you have in Iraq some people falling prey to the system, some people managing to negotiate independence, and other people becoming outlaws, and being imprisoned and dying. You have all sorts. I don't know any other society where poetry has such a place.

In the Green Zone in Iraq you have your radio, you have your food, you have your own electricity, your own toilets. Everything is a sealed American reality overlaid on top of an infrastructure that is crumbling.

Why is thinking about crime or imagining crime so goddamn central to pop culture? It doesn't matter whether it's American TV or British TV. And there's entire sections of bookstores devoted to crime.