SOURCE: Stone, Robert, and David L. Ulin. “Considering Chaos.” Los Angeles Times (30 April 2003): E8.

In the following interview, Stone discusses his past and the inspirations behind Bay of Souls.

On a recent Tuesday afternoon, Le Meridien Hotel in Beverly Hills looks like a setting from a Robert Stone novel, a study in contrasts, in silence and movement, in darkness and light. In the back of the lobby, the hotel bar sprawls like some abandoned post-colonial outpost, empty except for CNN beaming the latest images from Iraq.

A few feet away, a Japanese model poses before a fountain. As a photographer circles deliberately, like a predator, assistants jostle for position at his side. All the while, at a small table near the front of the lobby, Stone, at 65, sits unperturbed, oblivious even, looking off into some interior distance as he talks about his new novel, Bay of Souls, in...