Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Tenderberg.

It's a rhetorical question, sir,

but where would we need without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

I've been looking forward to this taping all month, because we're going to be talking

with Alan Gerganus about matters that range from adult secrecy to passion,

to the relation between privacy and fiction.

And I think it's going to be very exciting because, you see, people always talk about Gorgainis

as our living acrobat of fiction, as if Nabokov had left an air and what was mainly to be found

was prestidigitation and impressive sentences. I think that Gorgainis is about taking his characters over the top

and thereby taking us to places where we're uncomfortable,

where we're morally uncertain, where we don't know how to field what he's throwing at us.

Alan, what do you think?

I stand accused and I accept all the charges, Michael. Thank you. Yeah, I think the,

one of the many things that storytelling can offer is uncertainty, fascinated uncertainty.

And I think that the whole concept of narrative suspense is about withholding,

about withdrawing the carrot through the fiction until you're willing to do anything to find out who killed Roger.

And I've tried to incorporate that into the new novellas and to build a kind of detective

...