The novel is about five students of classics who are studying with a classics professor, and they take the ideas of the things that they're learning from him a bit too seriously, with terrible consequences.

The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up.

The Little Friend is a long book. It's also completely different from my first novel: different landscape, different characters, different use of language and diction, different approach to story.

So I'm not a Southern writer in the commonly held sense of the term, like Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who took the South for their entire literary environment and subject matter.

Raising the minimum wage represents a substantial financial burden for employers, particularly start-ups, early stage companies, and family-owned businesses. In response, business owners would be forced to either lay off workers or raise prices to offset the rise in labor costs.

One thing I never worry about is money, because I have my health and my family, and I can always go back to work.

Sports have always been a really important part of how I energize myself, as well as how I relax. I spend a lot of my spare time with my family playing tennis, biking and rollerblading.

I have grown up being a father. When my first son was born I was 17. I was a child bringing up a child. I was not capable of understanding what a dad was meant to be.