I don't ever think about the utility of fiction. I don't believe in it or certainly don't require anybody to consider it. A novel or short story might be useful to a reader in all kinds of ways, many of which no writer would ever foresee, which is a good thing.

The Democrats are hardly agents of change, or even remotely interesting talkers or reality observers. The workings of actual power in the US is so remote from the ordinary person, who, it seems, can only be victimized by it, but is powerless to change anything.

I'm not a Mexican writer, but I think everything that happens in Mexico affects the Mexican writers I know, in their sense of being human and of being Mexican, even if they don't in any explicit way address these issues in their writing.

What I see of the US Presidential elections from down here makes me want to disengage from that particular reality and just hole up and read. It's true. I think if I were living in the US, I would just turn my television and radio off for a year right now, and just read.

I don't ever think about the utility of fiction. I don't believe in it or certainly don't require anybody to consider it. A novel or short story might be useful to a reader in all kinds of ways, many of which no writer would ever foresee, which is a good thing.

Narco fiction novels have a reputation, at least here in Mexico among some of the writers I know, of being somewhat rushed productions, usually written in one way or another like crime thrillers, with something cheesily exploitative about them. It feels exploitive - taking this horrible and ongoing tragedy and trying to turn it into something entertaining. Or trying to turn it into something that might earn the writer a reputation of the sort that many writers believe they aspire to. Or earn them money.

Great fiction has been written out of the very darkest circumstances of our narco violence, and nothing written in either fiction or nonfiction has penetrated that darkness so memorably - you can even say beautifully, a relentless riveting forensic dark beauty that some readers in fact find themselves unable to endure - as Roberto Bolaño's 2666. Especially in "The Part about the Crimes." But here's the thing: nobody would call 2666 a "narco novel."