Leslie Marmon Silko’s first novel, Ceremony, sold a million copies. In The Turqoise Ledge, she turned to nonfiction to capture her world. “I thought if I didn’t write about the way things were when I was a girl that no one would ever know there had been this different way of being,” she said. Silko stopped by Zócalo’s offices to chat about her book, the encroachments on the land she calls home, and how even urbanites can find ways to appreciate the nature around them.

For centuries, from the earliest orientalists to the contemporary clash of civilizations theorists, the world has seemed split between East and West, and between Islam and Christianity, along some indefinite divide. But in The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam, Eliza Griswold posits a new way to think about the world: by considering the meeting place of the majority of the world’s Muslims and Christians, 700 miles north of the equator. “I started this book with the idea that four out of five of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims are not Arabs, they don’t live in the Middle East. They are Africans and Asians,” Griswold said. “Here, on the ground, along the tenth parallel, they meet with almost half the world’s two billion Christians.” Griswold stopped by Zócalo to chat about her travels along the line, and what we can learn from the cooperation and conflict she saw there.