You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

for you are the only animal,

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

Hi, this is Michael Silverblad, and welcome to Bookworm.

We're here in the studio this afternoon with Alice Adams.

Our second guest will be Oscar Iguelos, and Alice Adams is not a recent discovery of mine.

I've been following her work since, at least beautiful girl, her first collection of

short stories, which was followed by Rich Rewards, to See You Again, Superior Women,

Return Trips, and Second Chances. The new book is After You've Gone, a book of short stories

published by Alfred Knopf. It's a pleasure to have

you here in the studio and a little bit tricky to talk to someone I've been reading for such a long

time. Thank you. It's really nice to be here. Thank you. Beautiful. Beautiful girls seemed to be

when it came out such a incredible book of stories, and yet you've

managed in between novels to produce, what is this now, the fourth book of short stories.

Is it a pressure now to come up with a whole volume of short stories every three years?

It's so interesting that you should put it that way because the pressure, if any, is to come up with a novel.

The stories are simply there.

I mean, I write stories, excuse me, I write stories all the time, largely because I love to.

So after a couple of years, there they all are, all 12, 14,

you know, whatever I've done in a couple of years.

The title story in the volume after you've gone was interesting to me

...