By Jessica Stern, from My War Criminal: Personal Encounters with an Architect of Genocide, out this month from Ecco. The book recounts the author’s interviews, conducted between October 2014 and November 2016, with Radovan Karadžić, a former Bosnian Serb politician convicted for his actions in the 1995 Srebrenica genocide, in which more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were killed.

I sought a lot of advice about how best to interview Radovan Karadžić. One idea, suggested to me by the eminent scholar of Slavic literature Andrew Wachtel, was to ask Karadžić to interpret his own poems. Together, Karadžić and I went through…