On the Remote Possibility I Started All This

Eight years ago, I began work on JIHADI: A LOVE STORY, a novel about, among other things, an Islamophobe with outsized political ambitions -- and an extremist “caliphate” movement in the Middle East that appears to materialize out of thin air. Both of those notions were sheer fiction when I began working on the book in 2008. They are chilling reality now. I sometimes feel as though I have somehow managed, without meaning to, to summon up something evil, by daring life to imitate art. Please a...