I always read the Latin American writers. I love so many of them: Gabriel García Márquez, José Donoso, Alejo Carpentier, Jorge Luis Borges, Clarice Lispector. I also love a lot of American experimental writers and surrealist European writers. But perhaps The Persian Book of Kings was the greatest influence - I encourage people to look at it. There is such a wealth of incredible stories.

It [9/11 tragedy] has affected us on so many levels: economically, morally, spiritually, ethically. It's been all over the place. A new American identity emerged - we now live in a very different America. This is the power of the definitive event.

I guess none of the sides of my hyphen are particularly subtle cultures. But perhaps there is also a sense that these characters are all parentless - every character in this book is feral in some way - without any guidance in their upbringing. They find no choice but to seek refuge in extreme behaviors.

For me, every human is a little bit an exaggerated version of a real human - in most cases, they are versions of myself. I am someone deeply motivated by extremes - the poles not only become home for me, but they also become, strangely, my comfort zones.

I write first drafts feverishly fast, and then I spend years editing. It's not that sentence-by-sentence perfectionist technique some writers I admire use. I need to see the thing, in some form, and then work with it over and over and over until it makes sense to me - until its concerns approach me, until its themes come to my attention. At that editing stage, the story picks itself and it's just up to me to see it, to find it. If I've done a good job, what it all means will force me to confront it in further edits.

I always read the Latin American writers. I love so many of them: Gabriel García Márquez, José Donoso, Alejo Carpentier, Jorge Luis Borges, Clarice Lispector. I also love a lot of American experimental writers and surrealist European writers. But perhaps The Persian Book of Kings was the greatest influence - I encourage people to look at it. There is such a wealth of incredible stories.

9/11 was just an enormous event in so many senses of the word - I mean, we are still in the "post-9/11 era" and perhaps will be forever? Sometimes it seems like it. It was such a monstrous act of imagination over anything else - the actual fatalities, while awful, were not what distinguished the event from others.