It is more important to just be as honest as I can about my characters than to write some really great sentence.

There's something interesting about being really intimate and familiar with Israel, but still being American - that really thin piece of glass between me and my experiences.

I always tell my students to write the story all the way through, not to play with the language and fall in love with sentences that you then have to cut. I actually find that really difficult to do; there's something so demoralizing about looking at a pile of not very great sentences. As I ease into writing every morning, I tweak a sentence and then tweak a paragraph.

So it was doing all this research or going to the archives or doing all these interviews or traveling, and then trying as much as I can to delete all of that research in a later draft so that all the reader cares about is the characters.

Stuart Rojstaczer writes with enormous wit, style and empathy, and The Mathematician's Shiva is a big-hearted, rollickingly funny novel that's impossible to put down. A tremendous debut.

It was tricky [to write about Israelis], because everyone has an opinion about the Arab - Israeli conflict, and when I first started writing these stories, I was working for an Arab - Israeli human rights group. It was during the Second Intifada. It was this totally violent and intense time, and I think there's a part of me where I don't know how to write about that situation without getting my politics out of my messages, and that's something that was important for me not to do in this book.

The stories I love the most are where the author has a lot of empathy for everyone. The author loves their characters and takes their situations really seriously, and you feel like you're just dropped into a different world.