With Chris Abani, a Nigerian novelist and poet probably best known for GraceLand, about a boy named Elvis, a group of traveling actors, a witch doctor, thuggish cops, and the swampy slums of city Lagos. It’s really good.

Some excerpts:

His first book, a political thriller published in 1985 when he was 16, envisioned a neo-Nazi takeover of the government. When a coup threatened to topple the country two years later, the authorities decided that Abani’s book had set the blueprint for the uprising and jailed him for six months.

Having written a play that the government found subversive, Abani was given an ultimatum: sign a document confessing to treason (which carried the death penalty) or sign the death warrant of all his friends in the play.

Now he lives in Los Angeles.

“… even though Nigeria is a former British colony, architecturally it takes more from America. If you drive through a small town in America, it literally is like a small town in Nigeria, the way the power lines are overhead, and all that sort of stuff.”

“No, [Americans] don’t care about Africa. I don’t care about Africa, because Africa doesn’t really exist.”