It does not take much to imagine the humanity of people you don't know.

Palestinian society is filled with poetry, but not experimental poetry. The Palestinian poetry that people know is not the modernist experimentations, it's certain kinds of poetry that lends itself to recitation and song and things like that.

Culture is invited to the table usually only as raw material that needs no analysis.

The stories that confirm that bigger story are brought in and easily digested. But there's another set of stories that are always there, which do not confirm, but which complicate and contradict what we think we already know. And I'm always attracted to that. There doesn't seem to be much of a market for it. 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.

Certain readers will read my book not because they are interested in Iraq, but because they read crime fiction. I did want to get beyond just speaking to other Middle East scholars, so I'm happy about that. But this was, nonetheless, a novel I wish I got to read in Arabic and translate.

Academic writing you have to get right. Fiction you have to get plausible. And there's a world of difference.

It does not take much to imagine the humanity of people you don't know. An American author does not need to know a word of Arabic to write a book like the one I wrote.