Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

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

From KCRW Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblad and this is Bookworm.

Today my guest is Viken Bebarian.

He's the author of a first novel, The Cyclist, published by Simon & Schuster.

Now, you know, I don't have that many first novelists on Bookworm anymore,

but this book opens for discussion.

So many issues in that it is narrated by a terrorist.

He spends most of the duration of the novel in one hospital bed, in fact, or another,

and in fact he is a failed suicide bomber.

The fact that he's failed is both a moral and a circumstantial event in this novel, but this is the attempt to create a plot

out of the mind of a invented terrorist. Now, you're really making novel as mind field here, and I wondered what your

examples, where the idea for such a book came from?

I suppose I've had a mishmash of influences.

So if I would have to trace the genealogy of the book,

I would have to say that my actually family's experience was a catalytic event in making me sort of sit down and start to write the book.

And by that, I mean the experience of my father during the Lebanese Civil War.

He was actually killed in a terrorist act or a political act in 1986 when the Lebanese Civil War was in full bloom. And I suppose that incident became an

important component of my memory. And over the years, the distance of time and geography allowed me

...