Her dreams of being an artist have been suppressed; she is seething inside with rage and resentment. But she keeps her anger in until she meets another woman who has everything she does not: a husband, a child and a successful art career. And then everything begins to unravel. As Nora’s relationship with the woman and her family deepens, her inner life begins to come out.

Messud spoke with NPR’s Jacki Lyden about the book and about how Nora’s character is different from other female protagonists.

Interview Highlights

On the literary inspiration for her main character

“It’s in part a response to existing, ranting, misfit narrators — the granddaddy of them being Dostoevsky’s Underground man. And, of course, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man was a response to Dostoevsky. But there aren’t many ranting women. So she is, Nora is, a ranting woman who is — you wouldn’t, meeting Nora, think of her as a misfit, but her interior life is roiling.”

On what feminism meant for an older generation

“My mother was, perhaps, I mean, she was absolutely a feminist in her heart, but by 1970 when the Female Eunuch was published and Ms. Magazine came out, she was a 37-year-old mother with two children who had been moving around following her husband’s career. And the idea that she could realize her dreams was not possible. So it was something that was very much instilled in me by my mother that I needed to be financially independent. So for Nora, she has a similar message from her mother that you can’t necessarily earn a living being an artist.”

On why anger in women makes us uncomfortable

“Well, I think women’s anger is unacceptable. We live in a culture that wants to put a redemptive face on everything, so anger doesn’t sit well with any of us. But I think women’s anger sits less well than anything else. Women’s anger is very scary to people, and to no one more than to other women, who think my goodness, if I let the lid off, where would we be?” [Copyright 2013 NPR]

Actor-director Katie Aselton’s credits include the TV show The League, and the films Jeff, Who Lives At Home and Black Rock— currently in theaters and on VOD. The movie she could watch a million times is Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break.

Interview Highlights

On when she first saw Point Break

“I think I saw it in the Milbridge movie theater, probably with popcorn and a slushie and a boy. The boy was less memorable than the movie.”

On why she loves Patrick Swayze as Bodhi

“Oh my God, Patrick Swayze created a character that defined Southern California cool to me at that time. I was in Maine so I didn’t really know what that was, but he was like the Zen master who had no morals. I loved him.”

On the absurdity of the movie’s plot

“I think, you know, watching this in a theater in Maine and seeing this sort of lifestyle that was so foreign to me and yet so cool, and these guys were so dangerous, yet so at one with nature, and they had this connection to the ocean — it all seemed so mystical and beautiful and romantic and it totally got me.”

On what makes Point Break a good action film

“You can make jokes about it, and I certainly make plenty of jokes about it, but as you’re actually experiencing the movie, as you’re watching it, it totally scoops you up and takes you for a ride, and that’s what a good movie should do.” [Copyright 2013 NPR]

That was certainly the case for John Williams’ novel Stoner. When it was originally published in 1965, it received admiring reviews but sold just 2,000 copies and was almost immediately forgotten. The only publication to mention the book at all was The New Yorker, in its “Briefly Noted” column.

Fast forward to today and the book is experiencing a renaissance of sorts. It is a best-seller across much of Europe, including the Netherlands, where it has been the best-selling novel for the past two months. But it is not the action-packed thriller or steamy romance you might expect to be topping the charts. It is a quiet, slim novel about a young man who leaves a hardscrabble farm in Missouri to become a literature professor in 1910.

“It sort of pays tribute to a man whose life is, in one sense, utterly ordinary, but, in another sense, rich as anyone’s life can be,” said Edwin Frank, who runs New York Review of Books Classics, which republished Stoner in 2006.

But in the mid-1960s, Americans weren’t drawn to that style.

“That kind of realism was not in any sense fashionable at that point,” Frank said.

So the novel and Williams, who died in 1994, faded into obscurity, forgotten to all but a few aficionados.

When New York Review of Books Classics republished Stoner, it was reviewed quite well, but sold modestly at first — until it caught the attention of Anna Gavalda, one of France’s best-selling novelists. She had to read Stoner in English — there wasn’t a French translation — but she says she still felt a deep connection with the book.

“I think it’s a book I could have written myself because I feel really close to the author and the narrator, who, in my opinion are probably a bit of the same person,” she said.

Gavalda liked it so much that she asked her editor to buy the rights, so she could translate it herself. And the book took off.

“My books sell really well in France,” she explained, “so when all the other European editors saw that it was me who translated this book, they were all curious about why Anna Gavalda translated it, and so they all bought the rights.”

Back in New York, Frank can only speculate as to why Stoner has so moved European readers like Gavalda.

“[Stoner] resonates I think, partly, because of the art with which the story has been told,” he said. “So even as he sets the scene in Columbia, Missouri, at the same time, it could be anywhere.” [Copyright 2013 NPR]

I’d seen the movies before reading the stories — Nicolas Roeg’s masterful version of “Don’t Look Now” featuring Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie; and Alfred Hitchcock’s strangely flat-footed and clunky version of “The Birds” — so I thought I knew what to expect from Daphne du Maurier’s fiction. I was, in fact, a little bored by the prospect of reading these stories, since I’d already seen the movies, but one day a friend insisted, loaned me her copy of Don’t Look Now and just said: Trust me. I sat down while it was still light out, didn’t move from the chair until dark and have had a hard time sleeping ever since.

What I love and admire about the stories collected here — and all of them are great, but I will confess to loving “Don’t Look Now” and “The Birds,” the two stories that open the collection, more than the rest — is that they are eventful, by which I mean: Things happen. I had been on a streak of reading collections packed with stories that hinged on small misunderstandings, or featured passive characters typing emails to one another and being sad about their inability to express themselves. There is nothing wrong with stories like this, at their best you could say this sort of story is Chekhov 2.0, but at the time I was frustrated with my own writing. In my stories, nothing much seemed to happen; I was lucky if my character was able to, say, move a couch into his bedroom. It was depressing for everyone.

And then: that long day and this book. The stories collected in Don’t Look Now feature U-boats and ghost ships; murderers and femme fatales; love on the rocks; episodes of clairvoyance and psychic shock; and, of course, birds attacking humans. “Nothing’s been the same since. Nor ever will be,” says the narrator of “Kiss Me Again, Stranger” — and that is what you come to these stories for: each features characters who endure the strange and the extreme, and who are forever changed by the events that befall them.

Do some of these stories telegraph their endings? Do a few of them read like genre exercises? Sure, a few of them do. But the first two alone are worth the price of admission. “Don’t Look Now” is a strange and intimate masterpiece: a perfect distillation of the confusion and desire that attend grief, which, as the story progresses, adventures forward through the winding streets of Venice with the logic of nightmare. And then there’s “The Birds,” set on the desolate coast of Cornwall following World War II, which opens with a white cloud of gulls rising and falling in the trough of the seas “like a mighty fleet at anchor, waiting on the tide” — well, you know the story, or think you do. The movie is hammy and corny, but the story — both a precursor to the zombie scenarios so familiar these days and an early herald of the sort of environmental cataclysm we find ourselves on the verge of now — is absolutely terrifying. These stories open the book, and neither, once you turn the first page, lets you go.

All the stories in Don’t Look Now are, in their own way, refusals of comfort —they do not end well for the characters — but we, as readers, knew that would be the case going in. This is du Maurier, after all. The pleasure in reading this book lies in being plunged into situations that are so fraught with tension that you begin to look for a release, which, when it does come, is never from the anticipated direction. They are strange stories; they are surprising. “Are you in distress?” comes the hail from a ghost ship in “Escort.” The answer, as a reader, is surely: yes. But would you have it any other way?

You Must Read This is produced and edited by the team at NPR Books. [Copyright 2013 NPR]

Luckily for art lovers, Giuseppe Arcimboldo had nerve to spare.

Arcimboldo created this unorthodox produce portrait of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II back in 1590. By that time, the Italian artist had been painting for the emperor and his powerful Habsburg family for more than 25 years, so presumably, they’d grown used to his visual jokes. (The emperor has “peachy” cheeks and “ears” of corn, get it?)

Though he also dabbled in the angels and saints that were the standard stuff of art in his day, Arcimboldo is best known for his “scherzi” or “capricci” — “meaning jokes or games,” as David Brown, a curator at the National Gallery of Art, explains in this video.

“It’s very clear that’s how they were meant to be seen,” Brown says. “They were a source of amusement or entertainment, because there was this element of surprise.”

That they also often feature an element of fruits, berries or other foods is partly a reflection of the Renaissance blossoming of natural sciences, like botany.

“At a distance, they just look like heads in profile or three-quarter view,” Brown says. “Up close, they look like an incredible variety of nature’s wonders.”

That talent for upending the viewer’s expectations helps explain why Arcimboldo — whose work, Brown says, fell into “virtual oblivion” after his death — found new champions among 20th-century modernists. (Picasso and Salvador Dali were among his fans).

The latest to pay homage to this Renaissance man is American Philip Haas, an Oscar-nominated filmmaker (for Angels and Insects) and contemporary artist. This weekend, the New York Botanical Garden opened a new exhibit featuring Haas’ giant, 15-foot-high fiberglass sculptures based on Arcimboldo’s “Four Seasons” — winter, spring, summer and fall personified as people, crafted of foods, trees and other natural elements.

As in the originals, Haas’ sculptures contain clues to the foods of the 16th century, when Arcimboldo painted. Winter is a craggy-faced old man, and his “cravat” is made of oranges and lemons — imported from the warmer south, they were one of the few fruits that could be seen in Renaissance Italy during the colder months.

Summer’s bounty — in the shape of a young man, naturally — includes eggplant in his skull and corn ears, two crops introduced to Europe from Asia and the New World.

A fall-ripening gourd caps Autumn’s head. Figs dangle from his ears. The grapes that tumble from his head like hair and fill his wooden barrel chest both nod to Italy’s fall wine-making season.

Like Arcimboldo, Haas says he was attracted by the idea of playing with context and viewer’s expectations. “Arcimboldo was making a painting from the natural world, and then he turned it into a painting and [others] stuck it in a museum,” Haas tells The Salt. “I took it out of the museum and put it back into the natural world.”

The sculptures have been on a tour of Europe and the U.S., where they were most recently on display at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix.

By transforming Arcimboldo’s seasons into colossal 3-D sculptures, Haas says he aims to change how the viewer experiences not just the art but the natural world that surrounds them, too.

“Summer’s head has a cucumber for a nose,” he notes. “When that head was in Phoenix, suddenly it looks like a cactus. The works are quite elastic — they respond to the environment.” [Copyright 2013 NPR]

The envelope lay flat and perfectly sealed in the middle of the hallway. If it had not been in front of her locker I may have left it there. I thought of all possibilities before tearing open the smooth flap of pink paper.

Sliding it back into her locker in secret would have been the gentleman thing to do, the honorable thing. But she would never have known what a gentleman I was if I did that.

I could have given it back to her, she would definitely have noticed me then. Though soon after she would have given him the letter and that would have been the end of me. No. I wasn’t going to return it, I couldn’t bare to rid of it. Lunch that day consisted of me sitting hungry in a locked stall on top a stained toilet seat reading and re-reading those words, the words she wrote for him.

Every day and night since the third grade I had thought of her. Holding hands in the halls, going to restaurants with her family, watching television in the living room. I knew now that as I had thought of her, she had thought of him. She had experienced the same longing, the same doubt, the same tug of the heart when she saw him each morning and the same dread after school, of knowing she would not see him again until the next day.

One may think that a boy in love would be distressed to learn of the girl’s passion for another, upset, jealous … but that would be wrong. Sara and I were united in our love for the unattainable. We shared something personal. Separate, but intimate. Countless hours staring out our windows toward dying stars in a faraway sky, thinking of one out of reach. Smiling through the sadness of their absence.

Smiling every night.

I saw her the day I found the letter. Her nails bit down to shredded stumps, her leg bouncing restless as she looked this way and that for the one who may expose her secret. I only wished I could tell her not to worry, her heart was safe in my hands. But I couldn’t. I wasn’t strong enough to part with the only piece of her I would ever own.

She told Jeremy about her feelings for him soon after that. They dated for a few weeks, but as they do, things feel apart during the summer. Years later I still caught glimpses of her glossing over the crowd, the slight curve of a tiny smile at the edge of her lips, who found my letter? She asked herself in silence.

She would never know it was me. She didn’t have to. All she knew was that someone had found it, read it, and kept her secret. The words weren’t thought with me in mind, I knew that, they were never meant for me. But they were mine. [Copyright 2013 NPR]

A glimmer of gold caught her eye. She bent down and pulled the thin metal band from a pile of grime. It was the first time she saw a wedding ring devoid of a ring finger; she wondered where the naked finger was now, and whether it felt exposed or liberated.

The next day, a frazzled middle-aged man scurried into the bar and asked her if she had found his wedding ring. She remembered seeing him with a brunette woman the night before, a woman who wore no rings.

She smiled apologetically and promised to let him know if it turned up. As soon as he left the bar, she slipped the ring onto her finger. That night, no men lingered around and she closed the bar a half hour earlier than the night before.

She found the second and third rings later that week. One was wedged between the wall and bar counter and the other lay near the main entrance. This time, two women entered to claim them, wearing the same clothes as the night before. She gave them the same answer she had given the first man. They glanced down at the three rings piled on her finger and left without saying anything.

She had spent little time in her life thinking about marriage, but now it invaded her mind. Every time she found a stray ring, she cleaned it and pretended like it was brand new, made especially for her. She entertained fantasies of the handsome men who had given her these rings, and although they always had different nationalities and personalities, they shared their mutual adoration for her.

In a few months time, every inch of her fingers was adorned with wedding rings.

Serving beer with metallic hands proved to be an arduous task, as the glasses kept slipping from her grasp. She no longer bothered to peek inside the tip jar in between serving customers: she knew that it would be empty. Her manager politely asked her if she could remove her rings during work hours, but she could not bare the thought of losing Adam, Julian, Pablo, Manuel, Conrad, Griffin, Nadim and Alex.

She made the mistake of coming to work five minutes late on a Friday night and found her manager waiting for her with his arms crossed. It was the first time she had ever been fired and all she could think about was how happy she was to have the rest of the night alone with her dreams.

As images of blue eyes and well-defined cheekbones swirled about in her mind, she sunk into her bed and allowed her body to leave an imprint on the mattress. She felt as if her body was the same, and yet the outline of her hands had changed. The indentations of each ring left a pronounced mark on the bed, making the shape of her finger resemble a caterpillar or centipede. They wormed their way around her mattress and became their own separate entities, shedding the rest of her body completely. [Copyright 2013 NPR]

Jesse and Celine, played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, find each other in Paris for another brief rendezvous. Even though both are now in other relationships, they can’t shake their connection.

Another nine years have passed, and now they’re back together with a third film.

In Before Midnight, life has moved on. The couple has twin daughters. They’re living in Europe, talking about the things long-term couples talk about: job troubles, annoying habits, the banal details of life.

Director Richard Linklater says there’s a kind of romance to that, too. He says there’s optimism in the connection they still have and hope in how they continue to make each other laugh. But Linklater says it wasn’t an easy task.

“It was tougher to go into the domestic beast, you know, nine years in to them being together constantly, and find something within that that was still very interesting, hopefully, to watch,” he tells Rachel Martin, host of Weekend Edition.

The challenges — and rewards — for the actors are found in the moments of silence and “non-acting.”

“It’s easy to scream and cry and roll on the floor. As an actor, that’s what we’re trained for,” Delpy says. Walking alongside a longtime partner in the village is a different task, she says. Hawke adds:

“Trying to let the characters’ subconscious actually be seen without letting it be known that you’re showing it — that kind of fragile element of the movie, it’s incredibly delicate.”

The third film doesn’t hold the same kind of tension found in the first, which is bound by the deadline of a morning flight. But, Linklater says, the third film had to reflect the changes that naturally occur in life.

“We knew we couldn’t do the same thing again,” he says. “We couldn’t have another brief encounter, a fleeting connection … you have less of those, especially by the time you’re 40. You miss that part of yourself that could have done that, but it’s just a different stage of life.” [Copyright 2013 NPR]

“People were more constrained than they are today, they had less freedom,” he says, “but they had more security and there was a sense in which each generation felt that the next generation would be able to improve itself, to do better.”

But over the last generation, that deal has come undone. As Packer explains it, “many Americans feel that they’re all alone, that no one is going to help them and that, in a way, there’s a kind of unfairness at play in our society where elites seem to do better and better and ordinary people who might have once even thought of themselves as middle class, struggle more and more. That’s what’s unwound in my adult lifetime.”

And that’s what Packer explores in his new book, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America. It’s filled with vignettes and profiles of famous and ordinary American lives. He joins NPR’s Rachel Martin to discuss the book’s characters and how he first became aware of the unwinding trend.

Interview Highlights

On Tammy Thomas’ story

“Tammy was born, raised and still lives in Youngstown, Ohio. She’s African-American. She grew up during a time when Youngstown was a steel town and it was a union town, but around the time she was a teenager the steel mills just collapsed one after another in rapid succession and Youngstown collapsed with them so quickly that it became a kind of icon of de-industrialization. And I spent a lot of time with Tammy driving around the city, looking at the landmarks of her life and hearing her story, which was an incredible story of a woman who — her mother was a heroin addict, she was not close to her father, she had three children without their fathers really being in their lives. But she got a job in an auto parts factory and that allowed her to raise the kids and to hold herself and them together amid an absolutely disastrous situation in Youngstown.

“And then, around the time of the financial crisis and the election of Barack Obama, having lost her job because the auto parts factory went bankrupt, she remade herself as a community organizer and that’s what she’s doing now. She has not given up on Youngstown and I think even though these institutions are collapsing and people do feel they’re on their own, the individuals in the book … there’s a resilience and even an optimism that’s kind of remarkable given what’s going on around them.”

On Dean Price’s story

“I’ve never been anywhere that felt so old and so traditionally American as the Carolina Piedmont, which is the region that Dean comes from. It’s tobacco country; there used to be textiles and furniture-making. And then tobacco, as we know, fell with the ’90s and the investigations and the tobacco buyout and it kind of laid waste to what had been a very intact middle class and working class part of the country. Dean Price is a son of that region. His father was a Bible Belt preacher; his whole family had been tobacco farmers since the 18th century; they all live within about 10 miles of each other in Rockingham County, N.C.

“And again, around the time of the financial crisis, Dean, who had this truck stop business, watched his business fail — so he turned to biofuels. And he has this whole vision, which I think is a very American vision, of resurgence, a kind of renaissance of the countryside through alternative energy. But he’s doing it on his own. No one is telling him to; there’s no organization he’s part of; there’s no union or business trade association or newspaper that he’s connected [to]. He’s a loner out there; he’s a Johnny Appleseed spreading biodiesel across the countryside.”

On how American communities are suffering

“As Dean said to me while we were walking around Madison, N.C., the town that he grew up in, the shoe store was closed down, the pharmacy was shuttered, the restaurants were closed, there were just a couple people on the sidewalk — you see this in little towns all across the heartland. He said the guys who used to own those stores were the pillars of this community — they coached the little league teams, they were on the town council. They’re gone and communities can’t suffer that way without great consequences.”

On how he started to hone in on the unwinding trend

“I think it began with the Iraq War. I covered Iraq for The New Yorker, I wrote a book about it, and I’d begun by seeing that war as a failure of individual leaders, but over time I saw that whole institutions were failing. The military at the beginning of the war failed; intelligence, the media failed. And then the financial crisis made it seem as if there was something epical going on. And that’s when I began to think, ‘How would I write about a country that is watching its core institutions collapse?’ I wanted to do it as a narrative; I wanted to pull together stories of Americans whose lives have kind of moved to the pulse of this recent history. And so I went about the country trying to find people whose stories fit into that larger narrative.”

On whether the unwinding trend is cyclical

“In some ways it is cyclical. I think we’ve been through it many times before when ideas about how democracy should work ran into the reality of how it did work. It happened right after the founding of the country when the first generation of founders died out and what replaced them were these fractious, squabbling, rather noisy factions. The Civil War was a gigantic example of the country being unable to solve its problems democratically. The Great Depression, which created the structures — many of them — that I’ve been talking about, was another one. So I don’t want to say this is it, you know, we’ll never come back from this. We’ve come back before; we often come back stronger.

“What I see happening is not just cyclical, though, it feels like a real cultural shift where the value of the community, of what makes this a coherent society, has really been submerged. And it’s not all dark — we’ve been talking as if it’s a completely dismal picture, but what isn’t dark is the energy and the vitality and the humor and the dreams as well as the screw-ups and the setbacks of the characters in the book. When I stop thinking about the big picture and institutions and leaders, and I think about these people who I got to know so well, they still give me hope.” [Copyright 2013 NPR]

Hosseini followed that success with another book about his homeland, A Thousand Splendid Suns, which also became a best-seller.

Six years later, Hosseini has written a third heart-wrenching tale, set in Afghanistan, California, Paris and the Greek islands. And The Mountains Echoed is a story about family — specifically the siblings Abdullah and Pari, separated at a young age. Early on in the book, a young Abdullah thinks that he would rather forget Pari than be haunted by her memory:

Abdullah would find himself on a spot where Pari had once stood, her absence like a smell pushing up from the earth beneath his feet, and his legs would buckle, and his heart would collapse in on itself … Pari hovered, unbidden, at the edge of Abdullah’s vision everywhere he went. She was like the dust that clung to his shirt. She was in the silences that had become so frequent at the house, silences that welled up between their words, sometimes cold and hollow, sometimes pregnant with things that went unsaid, like a cloud filled with rain that never fell. Some nights he dreamed that he was in the desert again, alone, surrounded by the mountains, and in the distance a single tiny glint of light flickering on, off, on, off, like a message.

Hosseini talks with NPR’s Rachel Martin about the image that inspired the book, the pressures of success and why he considers all his novels love stories.

Interview Highlights

On how the book is centered on the siblings Abdullah and Pari

“It begins in 1952. Abdullah and Pari — Abdullah is 10 and Pari is 3, and they’re living in a remote and impoverished village with their father and their stepmother and their baby stepbrother. And the family finds itself at a critical point. They’ve lost a baby to the winter the year before, and winter is around the corner again, and the family is desperate to survive the winter, and they’re about to make a decision that is going to change the lives of these two characters, Abdullah and Pari. And it’s this decision which ends up splitting the brother and the sister, which informs, really, the heart of the book.”

On the role of memory in the novel

“In some ways, I see the characters in this book, as with all of us in real life, as victims of the passage of time. And memory is the way … we gauge that. So memory is a recurring theme in this book and the question is raised a number of times about whether memory is a blessing — something that safeguards in all the things that are dear to you — or is memory a curse — something that makes you relive the most painful parts of your life, the toil, the struggle, the sorrows.”

On why the book shifts between many different characters’ perspectives

“It kind of happened that way as I wrote it. The novel began very, very small, and it began with a single image in my head that I simply could not shed: … It was the image of a man walking across the desert and he’s pulling a little Radio Flyer red wagon, and in it there’s a little girl about 3 years old, and there’s a boy walking behind him, and these three people are walking across the desert. And I had no idea who they were, or why they were walking across the desert, what the story was behind them, what their dynamic was. And I sat down to explore that. And then it just kept snowballing. I began to see backstory, and I began to see how what happened to these three characters, particularly the little girl and the little boy, would have such a profound impact, not only on their life but on the lives of so many different characters. And I listened to the voice of those other characters, and I went chasing them.”

On whether the book feels finished

“No, I would love to go back and write two, three, or four or five more [chapters], but at some point somebody has to stop you. None of my novels feel finished to me. I mean, if I had my way I’d go back and add and edit and take out and reshape. But at some point you do have to stop.”

On why the political chaos of Afghanistan is less central in this novel than in previous novels

“Part of it was as I wrote the characters, it just kind of, the way it came to me and the way they were shaped, their struggles turned out to be far more intimate and personal. I mean, often it had to do with loss — of memory, of faculty, of love — and so the impact of the toil in Afghanistan is still there, but I think its effect on the lives of the characters is less resounding.

“I hope a day will come when we write about Afghanistan, where we can speak about Afghanistan in a context outside of the wars and the struggles of the last 30 years. In some way I think this book is an attempt to do that.”

On the kinds of relationships his novels have explored

“I think at the core, all three of my books have been love stories — and they haven’t been traditional love stories in the sense that a romantic love story between a man and a woman, you know, they’ve been stories of love between characters where you would not expect love to be found. So it is always these intense relationships that form under unexpected circumstances. And it’s the same with this book — there are a number of instances where you have relationships between characters that are very intense and life-changing and yet they’re between people you would not expect it to happen. And for some reason I’m drawn to that. I love writing about that. I’m not very interested in writing about sort of traditional, romantic love — I think that’s something that’s in my books, but not one that I seem to be all that interested in.”

On whether he feels pressure from the extraordinary success of his first two books

“I don’t feel any pressure to be … ‘successful’ in economic or commercial or number of books sold and so on. The real angst comes from the very real possibility that one day I will sit, and I will have nothing more to say. Because I enjoy so much the process of writing — losing myself in another person’s life, kind of going off to these imaginary places and looking up from the computer and eight hours have passed and I have no idea where they went. And writing things that, to me, feel intimate and real and genuine. I don’t take that for granted. So the pressure that I feel inside is, what if that ends someday and I’ve said everything I have to say? And I think a lot of writers have that, and that’s something very real every time I sit at the computer. That’s a presence in the room with me.”

On where he finds inspiration

“I’m kind of like those big satellite dishes that are constantly on and waiting to hear voices from outer space, like in Contact. My mind is always like that. I’m always open and just kind of waiting to receive some kind of hint about something that will compel me, and that’s kind of how this book happened. I just kind of had a very open mind and I was waiting for something to happen, and it just really, literally like a flash of lightning, out of the blue, this image of these three people walking across the desert, and that was just the seed from which everything else came.” [Copyright 2013 NPR]