Zia Haider Rahman & Eric Chinski  Authors & Editors in
Conversation   Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We
Know tells the story of a friendship—and the betrayal of that
friendship—set against the backdrop of economic crisis and the
war in Afghanistan. Editor Eric Chinski talked with Rahman
recently about his debut novel, the power fiction has to explore
human psychology, Rahman’s use of epigraphs, and the crucial
role that Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem plays in the narrative.
Eric Chinski: You have a background in advanced mathematics,
finance, and law. What compelled you to turn to writing fiction?
Zia Haider Rahman: I’ve always been in love with literature. I
was always reading novels. And I was always keeping notebooks
and writing pieces in them, short and long. But until I came
into my thirties, I had a belief that writing books was
something people of another social class did, a higher social
class, some would describe them. I wouldn’t have expressed the
belief in those terms—it would have been