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

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.

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.

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.

In translation studies we talk about domestication - translation styles that make something familiar - or estrangement - translation styles that make something radically different. I use a lot of both in my translation, and modernism does both. For instance, if you look at the way James Joyce presents Ulysses, is that domesticating a classic? Think of it as an experiment in relation to a well-known text in another language.

We like to look out on the world and see ourselves, so we have many, many novels, memoirs, and short stories in Iraq that are largely about Americans in Iraq, doing what Americans do.

There's actually a lot of information on a lot of people and that is a major achievement of a police state.