A novel can grant humanity even to those who act inhumanely, and by making men and women of monsters, it can offer not only a ground-level view of a particular conflict, but a descent into the substratum of human nature capable of the incomprehensible.

While looking up news from the North Caucasus on Twitter, I was linked to the sanguinely titled 'Seven Wonders of Chechnya Tour' on the website of Chechnya Travel, the postwar republic's first tourism outfit, founded in 2012.

To make a book convincing, it's less important that the right tree be in the right place than that the characters are emotionally real.

The idea that fiction can capture the stories that fall through the cracks of history informed 'A Constellation of Vital Phenomena,' which progresses across the two Chechen Wars of the 1990s and early 2000s.

A film that doesn't get distributed is like a child that never gets married.

I'm such an avid magazine reader - music, art, beauty magazines - and I found that food and restaurants were pouring into everything I cared about. Whether it was the pop-up concept, or some mysterious mini-mall restaurant, I got swept up in the sexy romance of the food movement.

I'm a huge pop music lover. I do love the immediacy, the organic fever that happens when a pop track is so infectious.

At heart, 'Chef' is a daddy-daycare fable about an overextended man who teaches his 10-year-old son the family business and learns to love him.