FROM A MAN WHOSE LATEST BOOK IS A 500-page-plus fantasy, it’s an incongruous remark. “I was trying to figure out whether I still wanted to write,” Paolo Bacigalupi says of the exercise in “creative play” that resulted in Navola, his remarkable new novel steeped in the violence, intrigue and beauty of Renaissance-era Florence. “Some of this is probably oversharing, but fuck it,” he adds. “I was basically doing a lot of creative writing where
I would write 500 words a day on anything I wanted,
