The fabulous Campaign for the American Reader of Marshal Zeringue features me on the Writers Read blog. I’ve been reading Olen Steinhauer, Barry Unsworth and Graham Greene. Find out which books and why.

How long did it take you to get your book published?

I got the book deal 18 month after I started the blog

Would you recommend any books on how to write?

I’m now reading a very interesting book “A Novel in a Year” which is a one year writing workshop for beginners or for people who are suffering during the journey of writing their novel, written by Louise Doughty.

What’s a typical writing day?

I usually save 4-5 hours a day for writing, I start at 3 am & end at 8 am. Most of this time of course gets wasted staring at the ciling or out of my window. But this is the time I force myself to sit at my desk for the purpose of writing

Do you think more young writers will be “discovered” because they write popular blogs, as you did?

A lot of them have been discovered because of my book, as it showed the publishers that you can be a blogger, you can be young and still be a best seller author

How would you describe what your book is about? And of course tell us why it’s so great?

My book is talking about a girl who is about to be thirty, she is going through this process that we call “living room marriages ” and faces a bad suitor everyday. The general idea is showing the pressure that women get from the society to get married before reaching thirty, which is the expiration date of Egyptian girls. I guess it was successful because it spoke out about a problem that all girls face but no one usually talks about. It also does that in a satirical way, which is very popular in Egypt today.

Are you still looking for a husband? Or are you less interested, now that you’re a popular writer?!

I’m not allowed to “look,” just to “wait.” Well , it’s not my first priority anymore, but I would like to have children one day and getting married is the only way to do that.

Do you think you have become a symbol for Egyptian women? For Arab women? Even for women all around the world?

I hope so. A lot of Egyptian and Arab women wrote to me saying that my story gave them hope, that they also can get power by speaking out about their problems and that my success story showed them that there are other important things in life than just being married.

How much research was involved in your book and how did you carry it out?

It was just from what I see and hear in my everyday life. I didn’t make much research to write it

Is your book going to be translated into other languages?

It was already translated to Italian, German, Dutch and English. There is a Polish offer, but the negotiation is not over yet.

Do you live entirely off your writing? Or do you have another job?

I work as a pharmacist, but my main income is coming from writing now

When you started your blog, did you want to write a book, too? Or did the publisher come to you with the idea?

When I started my blog I had no idea that a person like me can be a writer and have a published book. Writers were over sixty with thick glasses, grey hair and most of them had to be dead for the last 10 years before people start to buy their books and call them writers. The offer came from the publisher who saw a new audience reading new stuff and he thought that this might be a good idea. Thank God it was.

What’s the strangest thing that happened to you at a book reading or on book tour?

People asking to take a picture with me but warning me that they are not looking for a bride so I’d better not get any ideas.

What’s your weirdest idea for a book you’ll never get to publish?

I always dreamed about writing teenage novels but there is no market for this kind of novel in Egypt.

How long did it take you to get your latest book published?

Two years. America in an Arab Mirror was published in April by Palgrave Macmillan in New York.

Would you recommend any books on writing?

Yes, books like these are helpful: On Writing by Stephen King, Break into Fiction, First Draft by Buckham and Love, and of course the classic, The Elements of Style by Strunk and White.

What’s a typical writing day?

I teach during the day so the only time available is either early in the morning or late in the evening. The best time is in the morning, especially when I wake up after a good night sleep.

Plug your book. How would you describe what it’s about? And of course why’s it so great?

America in an Arab Mirror: Images of America in Arabic Travel Literature, 1668 to 9/11 and Beyond deals with Arab-American relations, cross-cultural communication, and cultural understanding in general. The New York Times published a good review of it on April 21, 2011. My interest in Arab-American encounters in history, literature, and the arts started over a decade ago. The accounts of Arab travelers to America have always fascinated me. I widely researched the topic and had opportunities to read papers on it at Princeton and Dartmouth where I greatly benefited from the comments and the questions posed by colleagues in the field of Arabic and Middle Eastern studies. A question that was raised by a Princeton Arabist after one of my talks on the topic was whether Arab writings on America could be regarded as a case of Occidentalism, a counter-Orientalism of sorts. In some ways this book is a reversal of what Edward Said described as the West’s Orientalist view of the East. One could say that its stories are an Arab way of saying, “We, too, can subjugate you, Westerners, to our tourist, voyeuristic gaze.”

What’s your favorite sentence in all literature, and why?

If the question is about “favorite lines” instead of “favorite sentence” then I would mention, without hesitation, the evocative lines uttered by Macbeth upon receiving the news of his wife’s death.
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Macbeth Act 5, scene 5

What’s the best descriptive image in all literature?

But let there be spaces in your togetherness and let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. — Khalil Gibran

The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind. — Khalil Gibran

Who’s the greatest stylist currently writing?

In Arabic I must mention Yusuf Idris, the greatest short story writer and playwright. In Arabic he employs the different register of modern Arabic and the very evocative expressions of the everyday spoken Egyptian colloquial. In my opinion he, not Naguib Mahfouz, should have received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Outside the Arab world one can mention Gabriel García Márquez.

Who’s the greatest plotter currently writing?

Dan Brown.

How much research is involved in your book and how do you carry it out?

The most difficult part was to hunt for the bits and pieces of Arab travelogues about America, specially the older narratives such as Father Elias al-Musili’s account about his visit to Spanish colonial America in 1668. At times I had to travel to different countries like Syria, Morocco, and Tunisia to look for sources.

Do you use other media, like music or art, to get yourself into the mood to write? Or to open up your creative faculties?

I believe that to get yourself into the mood to write, you need to surround yourself with beauty, and this can range from a beautiful painting hung on the wall in front of you through a piece of music to the scent of your favorite perfume. I like the scent of incense and I believe that the scent of sandalwood burning slowly and the taste of Arabian coffee with cardamom can do wonders to your mood. Beautiful works of art can inspire you to create other beautiful works of art. I read once that Tolstoy, inspired by a beautiful painting, was moved to write one of his evocative stories. Beauty engenders beauty.

What’s the best idea for marketing a book you can do yourself?

I have two answers, one serious and the other is not. My first answer is: The best idea for marketing a book is really to write a darn good one. My second answer is: Create a big controversy about your forthcoming book.

Could you live entirely off your writing?

No.

Did you write other books before you were published?

I wrote several books in Arabic and English. They are literary studies and anthologies of literary works.

What’s the strangest thing that happened to you at a book reading?

That was during a public talk in a community center in a small town near Boston. The guys in charge of videotaping the event had a fight with each other and they took their equipment and left in a huff.

What’s your weirdest idea for a book you’ll never get to publish?

Each chapter is produced in a different medium : Chapter One is on CD; Chapter Two in print; Chapter Three on video; Chapter Four is a painting of a scene in the book. For the conclusion you will have to dial a phone number and someone will sing it to you.

You’ve written in many different genres, including television and the novel. What are the most important differences in the actual process of writing?

I signed my first contract as a screenwriter when I was 19 and wrote something like 100 hours of tv-fiction since; I published one novel, last year, and I am writing the second. So, I am not sure I am equally qualified in the two genres. Having said that, the most obvious difference is the collective aspect of filmmaking and the very solitary act of writing literature. A screenplay does not exist until director, actors, photographer and the rest of the crew have turned it into a movie. Screenwriters can either resent or indulge in this lack of responsibility. Or be ambivalent about it, which makes for some interesting relationship issues with the director. A novel, instead, is your very own piece of work, you are the only one responsible for the final result, you are both the captain and the ship. I always liked the teamwork aspect of screenwriting but since I started writing novels I can’t say I miss it – I guess this means I was more ambivalent than I realized. And oh, the pleasure of taking hours, days even, to find the perfect turn of a sentence. No film producer will ever allow such a waste of time.

How long did it take you to get your novel published?

It’s almost embarrassing, how fast it went. A common friend (also in the publishing industry) recommended my manuscript to Mondadori’s chief fiction editor. Two days later he (the chief editor) phoned me saying he had read the first 100 pages and asked me to please not sell it to other publishers until he was finished. This was a Thursday afternoon. I wish I could boast about the cool answer I gave him,“I can’t guarantee this, I have to consult with my agent” or the like. The truth is, I was left speechless. The following Monday at 9 am he did call me; he’d finished the book during the week end and wanted to publish it. It’s the kind of story you’d never put in a script, it’s so tacky.

Would you recommend any books on writing?

I’ve read very few books of the sort. I enjoyed “On Writing” by Stephen King. It’s unpretentious, down-to-earth. King comes out as a very decent human being, surprisingly normal – well, at least until he discloses that, in order to able to write, he has to listen to heavy metal. I recently read a great book by Israeli master Abraham Yehoshua, it’s a series of interviews and conferences he held in Turin, Italy. I am not sure it’s been translated in English, the Italian title is “Il lettore allo specchio” (The reader at the mirror), it’s published by Einaudi.

What’s a typical writing day?

I am a working mom, I have two kids, a life partner, a house, Italian standards for cooking and eating (that means high). What all this means is that I have no schedules, no rituals, just one rule: write whenever you can if you can. You never know which family crisis/household need/unmissable-episode-in-the-development-of-the-adorable-careers-of-your-genetic-material shall happen next moment, requiring your attention and disrupting your concentration.

Tell us about your novel. And of course tell us why it’s so great?!

The backdrop of my novel “Eva dorme” (‘Eve sleeps’) is the 20th century history of South Tyrol, a province in the far North of Italy inhabited by a German-speaking ethnic minority. That’s where the Dolomites are. Hikers, skiers and climbers from all over the world visit it every year. Very few people, however, know about its turbulent history: the traumatic way in which it was torn away from its homeland Austria and given to Italy after World War 1; how Fascism occupied it and set about ‘italianizing’ it (people were forbidden to speak German in public, for instance); the bloody years of terrorism and state repression in the 60’s. Quite a typical European story, you might say. The main difference with places like Ulster or Euzkadi is that the escalation of violence – which in the bloodiest years nobody imagined would end anytime soon – was defused in the early ‘70s by an enlightened political compromise between central State and local politicians. My main character Eva, a 40something woman in today’s prosperous South Tyrol, is the fatherless daughter of an unmarried woman – not an easy condition in the rural Alpine society of the 60’s. As a little child, Eva gets a taste of what it might mean to be loved by a father when her mother falls in love with Vito, a soldier sent – like many others – from Southern Italy to fight the terrorists. As an adult, in today’s complicated Italy, Eva takes a long train ride all the way down from the Alps to Calabria – the tip of the ‘boot’ – to find out what happened to the only man who ever treated her as a daughter. It’s basically a story about fathers, fatherless-ness, fatherlands and what identity means. And also about bewilderment: the bewilderment of a community coping with a collective trauma (losing the Homeland); of young men in uniform asked to shoot at and sometimes torture (that happened too) civilians with very un-Italian names like Gudrun or Günther; of a fatherless girl who as an adult asks herself whether the taste of fatherly love she was briefly granted was for real or just an illusion.

What’s your favorite sentence in all literature, and why?

This is a tough one. There’s the incipit in Robert Musil’s “The Man Without Qualities”, especially the third sentence: “There was a depression over the Atlantic. It was travelling eastward towards an area of high pressure over Russia and still showed no tendency to move northwards around it. The isotherms and isotheres were fulfilling their functions” Ah, I love it! What are human dramas after all, as long as isotherms and isotheres go about fulfilling their functions…

Who’s the greatest stylist currently writing?

This one is easy: Alice Munro. How, how does she do it?! I read and reread her books trying to capture a glimpse of the secret of her style, effortlessness, depth, gigantic understanding of the human condition. I am not an admirer of Alice Munro: I am a believer.

Your novel focuses on specific events in Italian history and, I understand, much of it is based on fact. How much research is involved in the book and how do you carry it out?

My book has a very political side to it, especially in the way it challenges Italy’s ingrained unwillingness to face the uncomfortable truths of its past. The terrible political, social, moral mess Italy is in nowadays has a lot to do, in my opinion, with a national identity very much based on denial. Also, the more I researched the more I found out links between the very local history of terrorism in South Tyrol and the wider picture of post-war Italy, especially the terrorist bloodbath of the 70’s and early ‘80s. This means I couldn’t risk making blunders on the facts, they were too controversial. Historical research had to be very thorough, and that’s how I tried to go about it. On the other hand I am a novelist, not a historian, so history books were not enough for me and I felt I had to speak with real people. I interviewed many retired military men from Southern Italy who served in South Tyrol in those years; cooks and chefs in the then booming tourist industry (Eva’s mother is a cook in a luxury hotel); old people in general who remembered those bloody times. Researching my book had a very moving, unforgettable side to it: all the German-speaking South Tyroleans who thanked me, an Italian, for showing an interest in their forgotten, unacknowledged story.

Once you base something in a real historical period, do you feel limited as a writer in the things you can do with your characters?

Oh, but I love limitations! Writing about a character belonging to a world which is not my own is so interesting. You have these limitations given by the customs of time and place, and you set about exploring the possibilities. Plus, this helps you find the bottom-line feelings we all human beings share, regardless of where or when we live. What can be more interesting than that?

What’s the best idea for marketing a book you can do yourself?

I guess a good start is to write the best book you can, to the best of your abilities, then find the best possible publisher interested in it. After that – I suspect – things are no longer in your hands.

What’s your experience with being translated?

There’s a lot of ambivalence at being translated: it’s obviously a wonderful thing if your book crosses the national borders (even more so those of a minority language like Italian) but then the final text will not and cannot be in your control. You can check it in the languages you speak (I can’t thank enough my German and French translators for their aplomb when they got back from me manuscripts covered with scribbles), but at the end what you need is a leap of faith. Having said this, the first time I listened to my novel being read aloud in a foreign language I got goose bumps. It was like seeing your child being turned into, say, a Chinese, and yet still totally being the individual he’s always been.

Did you write unpublished novels or plays before you were actually published?

Somewhere in my hard disk there’s a collection of unpublished short stories. They’re in English because the years when I wrote them I was travelling in Asia most of the time and only rarely spoke Italian. I sent them to a handful of publishers, received four rejection slips, gave up (I know, four rejection slips are supposed to be too few to give up but still…). Shortly after that I had my first baby, priorities changed, time passed… Rereading them now I must say I am relieved they were never published. On the other hand, I’m happy I wrote them: they were an important stepping stone in developing my style. Which raises a question: can you develop your style in one language and then end up writing novels in another? Well, that’s what happened to me, but I’d be interested in the opinion of other bilingual writers.

What’s the strangest thing that happened to you on a book tour?

Being on a book tour is, in itself, a strange thing. Writers are supposed to be introspective people, undaunted by the years of loneliness needed to write a novel. Then, when the book is out, they are suddenly expected to turn into entertainers. That’s pretty strange, I find.

What’s your weirdest idea for a book you’ll never get to publish?

Nothing would be weirder to write than my autobiography.

You’ve had a career in medicine that most doctors would envy and success as a writer that few memoirists or novelists attain. How do you manage both careers so well?

I think there is no separation between the two. My identity, beyond that of being a father, a son, a citizen and so on is completely that of being a physician, of having the privilege, the honor, the calling to serve. I am old-fashioned in that sense, and get much satisfaction from this sense of serving the profession, honoring its ideals, celebrating its grand history (in novels or memoirs), and in repeatedly professing my faith in the “Samaritan function” of being a physician (to use the late physician Robert Loeb’s term). I resist the definition of the writer as somehow separate and divorced from my day job, as if it were akin to leaving work and performing burlesque after hours. I do subscribe to the notion as a form of research, exploring the truth. Having said that, I feel that the writing (no different than, say, the music if you are a musician, or the bump and grind if you do burlesque) has to stand on its own, has to work by the standards of the discerning literate reader for whom I write. He or she cares little, I suspect, what degree I have behind my name (and I don’t put M.D. behind my name on my books). Writing has to work by the standards by which writing works.

How long did it take you to get your first memoir published?

It was my fictional story, Lilacs, in the New Yorker in 1991 that led to my getting a contract to write, My Own Country. It came right after my five years at a small hospital in Johnson City, Tennessee, where, in a town of just 50,000 people, as an internist and infectious diseases specialist we were looking after nearly a hundred people with HIV infection, an unexpected number for that population. It turned out there was an explanation for that mystery, and I wanted to tell it. I go the contract to write it in 1991, just after graduating from the Iowa Writers Workshop. I actually wrote the book while working full time in El Paso at the teaching hospital at Texas Tech. I wrote it in my nights and weekends and it took four years.

Would you recommend any books on writing?

So many good ones. A new addition is Francine Prose’s Reading like a Writer: A Guide for People who Love Books. John Gardner’s books, The Art of Fiction and Becoming a Novelist are still so precious, as is Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings. But truly the most important thing to do is keep reading and keep writing. It is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration.

What’s a typical writing day?

Given my day job all these years (which I love and which is who I am), writing for a set amount of time every day is not going to happen. Something that really helps is that I have a secret second office, without even a sign on the door, where I escape a few half days a week to write. It is a great source of peace and gives me time to be reflective and write. Of course, I also do a lot of writing at nights, early mornings and over the weekend, and sometimes that is hard on my family.

“Cutting for Stone” is an epic of two orphaned Ethiopian brothers. How would you describe its themes?

I think the themes are epic themes – of love and loss, success and failure, life and death. And how medicine and a career in it can save you or destroy you. And how love redeems us and seems to be the only thing that lasts.

Where did the idea for the novel come from?

All I had at the outset was an image of a beautiful Indian nun giving birth in a mission hospital in Africa, a place redolent with Dettol and carbolic acid scents, a place so basic, so unadorned, that nothing separates doctor and patient. You know what I mean: no layers of paperwork, cubicles, computers and forms–just a line of patients stretching out the door. That is all I had. I did not know the whole plot or how it ended.

What’s your favorite sentence in all literature, and why?

No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place….Isaac Babel. I love Babel and the quote says it all. Period.

What’s the best descriptive image in all literature?

Flannery O’Connor’s description of a face being as round and innocent as a cabbage.

Who’s the greatest stylist currently writing?

Goodness, that is hard. I admire so many for so many reasons: John Irving is a masterful storyteller, an architect of stories, and how to construct a plot, not to mention incredibly original and funny. Ondaatje does miracles that are hard to even explain – they just manifest as you read. Gunter Grass, Gabriel Garcia Marquez . . . so many. As you can see, I am partial to the epic and multigenerational story – a life or several lives playing out on a large canvas.

Your earlier books examined issues like AIDS and the abuse of drugs and alcohol by stressed physicians. Do you think someone who lacked your experience as a physician could’ve written successful books about these subjects? If someone had tried, how would their books have differed from yours?

There were and are many books written about AIDS and about physician abuse of drugs and alcohol, which is actually a more widespread issue than is generally known. I think that these issues can be addressed in many different ways, and sometimes a book works. Against my initial inclination, my editors urged me to make myself (and my experience as a physician) a character in the book to make the subject and the story compelling. With some trepidation, I did so – and it worked. Much of a book’s success can often be due to timing and I have been lucky with that – shortly after My Own Country came out, another physician wrote a story about AIDS, about his own struggle having contracted HIV in a needle stick. But despite great publicity and coverage, it did not do well. America had by then lost interest. I happened to be luckier with the timing.

What’s the best idea for marketing a book you can do yourself?

Tell a good story. Have a fabulous editor. The two go together. (My editor was the marvelous Robin Desser). Short of that, it is all witchcraft, and God knows if the book tours and PR and all the other things we do make that much difference. If you have a good story, then you can pray that a word of mouth is created. If any of us really knew the answer to your question, we’d patent it and sell it!

What’s your experience with being translated?

I’m delighted that Cutting for Stone has been translated into as many languages as it has been. I have worked closely with some translators and have been impressed by the questions they ask and the ambiguities in my own writing they found. But since I can’t actually read a translation, it is a bit hard to say what has happened in the process, or if it has succeeded or been even better than what I originally wrote.

Did you write unpublished books before you were actually published?

No. I have been very fortunate to have a contract for each book before I began.

What’s the strangest thing that happened to you on a book tour (apart from being asked to answer these questions)?

I have had two people turn ill at two different locales when I read a scene about a vasectomy. I suppose it could have been something they ate, but I took responsibility.

What’s your weirdest idea for a book you’ll never get to publish?

That would be revealing my deepest, darkest secrets. You’ll just have to wait and see.