We Can Open Up Our Computers And

Novel Writing Is The Slowest Art Form In The World. It Is Not A Sprint. It Is Not Even A Marathon. It Is A Series Of Marathons That Stretch Over And Over Across A Continent.

I Think I've Always Been Drawn To The Second Person. When I Was Growing Up And Playing With My Friends, The Usual Way We Interacted With Imaginary Worlds Was As Characters: A Bench Was 'your' Boat, Leaves On A Lawn Were The Fins Of Sharks Out To Get 'you.'

I Feel Engaged With Young People In Pakistan. But That Said, It's Still A Small Minority That Reads Novels, Literary Fiction. But It Isn't Necessarily A Small Minority Of The Wealthy Elite In The City Of Lahore. It Can Often Be And I Often Do Meet At Literary Festivals Students Who've Ridden A Bus 12 Hours From A Very Small Town Just To Hear Some Of Their Favorite Writers Come And Speak.

You Know, Very Often, If You Look At The Kinds Of Communications That They're Getting In An Isis Recruiting Video, The Videos That, You Know, That One Hears Of As Radicalizing Them, These Are Like Action Movies. And So In The Sense, It's That By Closing Off The Idea That Young Muslims And Particularly Young Muslim Men Can Be American Heroes, It Increases The Chance That They'll Try To Be Some Other Kind Of Hero. And That, I Think, Is Entirely Counterproductive.

I Think Sometimes Feeling That You've Been Marginalized Opens You Up To The Realization That, In Their Own Lives, Almost Everyone Experiences Marginalization, A Kind Of Foreigner Sense.