3. Do you come home to Texas to write at any time during the year?
I have family and good friends in Texas, so I go back fairly often. In 2002, I lived in Austin while on sabbatical. In 2004, I wrote Goodnight, Texas while living at the Paisano Ranch of famous Texas writer J. Frank Dobie, a stone's throw from Barton Creek, in the shade of elm oaks and junipers. In 2006, I visited four times, mostly Austin. I'm still trying to move back and have told my wife I want our baby girl to grow up to be a Texan.

4. Name five works in your home library you love most.
There are so many great books that five can't suffice. Cormac McCarthy's The Road, published just last fall, is one of the great novels of our time, a devastating tale about the end of the world. His novels Suttree and Blood Meridian are the greatest from the eighties. Pete Dexter's Deadwood, set in Deadwood, South Dakota, and Paris Trout, set in Georgia, are two others I love. I'm also a big fan of all the novels of Vladimir Nabokov, but particularly The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and King, Queen, Knave. But there are so many great books that five can't suffice. Just recently I read William Gay's Twilight, which is a Southern Gothic shocker, and am now reading Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land. He reminds me of what I didn't like about living in New Jersey.

5. Are you at work on another novel?
Yes, I'm about halfway into a new novel, tentatively titled After Greatness. The title refers to a coming chaotic period in American culture in which we have slid into 21st century funk, feeling as if we've lost the way of what made our nation great. It's set in Colorado and Texas in a not-too-distant future, where the turmoil of the world has created a new frontier mentality. A descendant of Jesse James is one of the main characters, as well as a young woman whose Mormon fundamentalist father is trying to coax her into a polygamist marriage. It imagines a chaotic future beset by virus outbreaks (such as bird flu), war, global warming, overpopulation, and immigration. Into the mix is the effect of technological innovations that don't solve, but certainly complicate, our problems. In other words, it's a world much like our own, soon to come. The novel begins when the young woman abandons her baby, and looking every day at my adorable baby girl, that seems to me one of the hardest things a person could do. It's a mystery at the outset. I hope it creates a sense of momentum that propels the story forward, into a mythic world to come, one in which the "greatness" is being regenerated.