Describe your latest project.
Three years ago, I came across a nearly forgotten fact: In the early 1800s, when much of the world remained uncharted, the most accomplished traveler of all time was a man named James Holman (1786-1857) — a man both intermittently crippled, and permanently blind. Even more astonishingly, he traveled alone.

I'm not a biographer by trade. But as I learned more about Holman's adventures -- fighting the slave trade in Africa, being held prisoner in Siberia, helping to chart the Australian outback -- it seemed an injustice that this extraordinary man (famous in his day as "The Blind Traveler"), had died in an obscurity that only deepened in subsequent centuries. My idle curiosity became a quest, and the genesis of the first-ever biography of Holman: A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History's Greatest Traveler.

The story I unearthed was even more incredible than I'd imagined. So much so, I realized I could take no liberties whatsoever -- The Blind Traveler was improbable enough. My challenge was to make A Sense of the World succeed as a story, as a work of narrative nonfiction, while drawing every aspect (even the dialogue) directly from the historical record.

What fictional character would you like to date, and why?
I'm happily married now, thanks. But let's just say Pippi Longstocking holds a special place in my heart. It was a revelation when I was six or seven to encounter her — an unrepentantly strong, independent female, taking no guff from pirates, marching to her own tune and proud of it. And those prehensile pigtails!

Aside from other writers, name some artists from whom you draw inspiration and talk a little about their work.
Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips. Among the lessons of Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots: don't fear sincerity, and at the same time don't hesitate to disrespect genres. Heck, turn them into food fights.

Introduce one other author you think people should read, and suggest a good place to start.
I'm a lifelong evangelist for Theodore Sturgeon, the real-life writer whom Kurt Vonnegut immortalized as Kilgore Trout. Vonnegut awards Trout a posthumous Nobel Prize (for writing that originally appeared in porno mags), and Sturgeon wrote these exquisite short stories, triumphs of humanism and emotional complexity, that were first published in the science-fiction pulps. North Atlantic Books is lovingly collecting all of them in a projected ten-volume set; go dig up "Slow Sculpture" and see if it doesn't break your heart.

What is your favorite literary first line?
It's not the very first line, but it's on the first page of Lolita:
"You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style."

What do you dislike most?
The triumphal march of the Simples -- everyone who tries to impose an overly simplistic worldview on the necessary complexities of real life. Terrorists don't "hate our freedom," folks. And if they did, well, Osama bin Laden is not in Iraq.

Offer a favorite sentence or passage from another writer.
From Sam Harris, The End of Faith:

The Bible, it seems certain, was the work of sand-strewn men and women who thought the earth was flat and for whom a wheelbarrow would have been a breathtaking example of emerging technology. To rely on such a document as the basis for our worldview...is to repudiate two thousand years of civilizing insights that the human mind has only just begun to inscribe upon itself through secular politics and scientific culture.

What is your favorite indulgence, either wicked or benign?
Taking the long way around.