Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special dream.

For you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm. This is Michael Silverblad, and today my guest is

Andre DeBue III. He's the author of House of Sand and Fog, a rather remarkable novel

published by Norton and two other previous books. Now, the House of Sand and Fogg

is a book that, in a way, brings an ethnicity into American literature. A good half of the novel is

narrated from the point of view of an Iranian family.

And I wondered about the background in preparation for bringing such a family at the center

of a novel.

I tend to work really intuitively.

I try not to plan ahead too much or really know what I'm doing, because I think the imagination

thrives when we weirdly haven't got a clue.

I've been fortunate enough to befriended some Iranian people over the years and count some

of them as some of my best friends.

My imagination was captured by the situation of a man I knew who was a retired Iranian

colonel in the Shah's Air Force.

He sort of came in organically and when he came, I made the – I had to make the decision

to either tell it in a sort of a distanced, omniscient point of view or from the point

of view of the other and I thought I'd really take a leap and just try and be him.

...