India, June 28 -- 1Did the title The Emperor of Gladness lead the story, or did it occur to you while you were writing the characters? It haunted the story. It comes from Hamlet. "Your worm is your only emperor. We fat all creatures else to fat us and we fat ourselves for maggots." No one gets to heaven without going through the maggot. For me, that was a big treatise about how I think about work and life. There is also (the poet) Wallace Stevens: "The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream." That poem is about a funeral. I love these paradoxes. The title too feels triumphant. But as you read, you realise the book is trying to redefine what an emperor is. An emperor hog is named after who will eat it. It doesn't rule anything. Gladness is a town that doesn't exist. So, to be The Emperor of Gladness is to be the emperor of nothing. 2Especially moving is the way you tackle the long-term effects of war, not just on those in the thick of it, but across generations. How has war shaped your worldview and writing? I think war is the most common and steadfast reality of our species. If you think of the earliest works, I mean, The Mahabharata is about war. Gilgamesh, The Iliad, The Odyssey - all about wars. In the publishing world, which is largely made up of people from the upper middle class, most of life in literary fiction is about living in suburbia, having relationships and affairs. But you realise that that's an exotic, rare thing; most of our human life is about geopolitical violence and war. Most of what is considered highbrow literature is about static, safe, suburban or city life. And then when you read fantasy, it's all about war. I think it's interesting that those books are more honest to our human condition, even though they're about non-reality. To me, it was really important to centre how war haunts so much of our life, history and our material production, including novels. 3The story pays much attention to people who are forgotten, especially those who lose themselves to addiction. What drew you to focus on this part of American life? Well, this is the most common part of American life and, I just didn't see it [reflected in literature]. When I did see it, most of what I saw felt like "poverty porn". These subjects and communities are used as symbolic pawns by someone outside that community, who benefits monetarily from their lives, by creating material that will be read by someone outside that community too. If you drive through the US, you realise that very, very few places look like New York City or the Hamptons. Most places are down-and-out trailer parks, broken-down infrastructure and dirt roads. I don't believe that my work is corrective but it's adding something new and expanding what the novel can perform....