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.

It's true that Americans are less than thrilled with President Obama and congressional Democrats. Their approval ratings are nothing to celebrate. But electoral politics is a zero-sum game. If one side loses, then the other side wins. Success depends on being just slightly less odious than your opponent.

I am more interested in how people interpret the phrase 'Elect The Dead' than what I may or may not have intended. I named the album after the track, which is a spiritual song about love, life and death and is the heaviest song on the album without having any heavy instruments.

The remarkable fact is not how much government does to control economic activity, but how much it does not do.

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.