Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW,

Santa Monica,

I'm Michael Silverblatt,

and this is Bookworm.

Today, my guest is

Alex Garland,

the author most recently

of the coma,

published by

Riverhead Books.

He's the author

as well of two previous novels, The Beach and

the Tesseract. Now, the coma is a fairly unusual book because it's about the absenting of awareness

from its central speaker.

And consequently, I believe the book provides us with many, many blank pages that kind of act for the vacancy of his consciousness.

And with a set of woodcuts as well, which, you know, give us a kind of black and white vision of what he's trying to remember or thinks he's seen.

So that reading the book, the reader is going from pages of sparse prose to pictures that you sort of peer at to see their content, to spells of blankness.

...