Half the country seceded from the other half when Abraham Lincoln was elected because half the country couldn't abide his position on slavery. You would think 150 years later this had all become pretty historically incontestable. Yet millions continue to contest it in the face of history. Rather the denial of slavery and all its monstrous repercussions defines to one twin America what the country is and means, and therein is the DNA of those "alternative facts" that people believe when they can't stand to believe the truth.

It wouldn't have occurred to me that while this old white man, which is to say me, was voting for Hillary Clinton, white women were choosing an overt misogynist [Donald Trump] over the first woman president. Someone will have to explain that one to me someday.

These days in particular it seems not only unavoidable but even irresponsible to not acknowledge politics in some way.

I'm my own "ideal reader" in the sense that I write novels that I would want to read.

I think most novelists I know, certainly including me, feel the novels choose them rather than vice-versa.

I think for the foreseeable future we have to disabuse ourselves of any ideas of unifying, or coming together, or all getting along. I don't think we're going to reconcile the America that elected the first African American president with the America that just elected a president avidly endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan - I'm not sure I even want to reconcile the two.

Western music is arguably America's greatest contribution to the 20th century, cultural or otherwise.