The Infinities' is a shortish book but densely loaded with Nabokovian slyness, gorgeous imagery, and disturbing insights into what it means to be mortal.

For novelists, sharply drawn moral conflicts are often useful, and even human and personal disasters can be seen as material.

DeLillo has said that he no longer feels a compulsion to write long, compendious books. In his later years, Saul Bellow said something similar. DeLillo, of course, has written very long in the past, notably with the 850-page Underworld (1997), and his story has been America.

If I had been brought up in America, I think I would still have had the same sort of job as a writer.

Those of us who actually were working in the region at the time will point out how strongly committed we were to supporting the democratic process and encouraging elections, in spite of the fact that a war was going on in several of these countries.

Like its politicians and its war, society has the teenagers it deserves.

In the Arab and Israeli worlds' eyes, Jared Kushner is a perfectly plausible American arbiter of - if not peace - then at least more process, procedure, and posturing.

There really can be no peace without justice. There can be no justice without truth. And there can be no truth, unless someone rises up to tell you the truth.