Interviews

"In St. Louis, we played in a juvenile prison: teenage African-American boys being held hostage. They're the most grateful audiences I've ever experienced, because nobody's giving them anything."

"But the goshawk wasn't a replacement for loss. It was an escape from being me.  It was an escape from deep concentration on something, to the point where one forgets one's self utterly."

"The Quran heals Moses's arm, whereas the Old Testament is very happy to use that sign in the opposite way. There's such a tight-knit connection between the two texts."

"Joining the LTTE was their way of getting freedom: they could wear pants, they watched movies, they read a lot. Everything was consumed by militancy, as was feminism."

"The character in my first book was a Jewish man born in Baku, Azerbaijan during the first Russian Revolution who flees on a camel caravan to Afghanistan, and settles in Germany right before the Nazi takeover."

"Homeless children were giving birth to homeless children, so there were now second and third generations of these homeless children. They lived at night, when the city had gone to sleep."