A novel can grant humanity even to those who act inhumanely, and by making men and women of monsters, it can offer not only a ground-level view of a particular conflict, but a descent into the substratum of human nature capable of the incomprehensible.

To make a book convincing, it's less important that the right tree be in the right place than that the characters are emotionally real.

The idea that fiction can capture the stories that fall through the cracks of history informed 'A Constellation of Vital Phenomena,' which progresses across the two Chechen Wars of the 1990s and early 2000s.

My first real awareness of Chechnya came when I was a college student studying in Russia. I arrived in St. Petersburg about two months after Anna Politkovskaya was assassinated for her reports on Chechnya. I lived with an elderly woman and her grown children in an apartment that was not too far from the neighborhood military cadet school.

Time travel was once considered scientific heresy, and I used to avoid talking about it for fear of being labelled a 'crank.'

I think 'Paranorman' was a great adventure.

Perhaps you could say that mountaineers are driven by ego or our competitiveness, but there's a lot more to it than that. Whether it's a huge face in the Himalaya or some crag in the woods behind your house, exploration offers us a unique perspective on the world that you can't really find anywhere else.

I love adventure stories.