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 Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today on the show, I'm very pleased to have a first novelist whose book has already landed

on the bestseller list and received some of the most happy, critical acclaim that a first

novel has received in several years. The book is the Joy Luck

Club and the author is Amy Tan. It's a new book from Putnam and we'll be talking with Amy today

and then afterwards with her editor, Faith Sale, at Putnam's. Amy, this book is so beautiful and at the same time as it is beautiful,

it has a lot of terror. It's a book about a culture coming to the new world and discovering both the terror of the old world

and the kind of hardness of the new world.

And I guess what I found most interesting about the book

was that doubleness of tone,

that the Chinese elders and the American young women were really, although one was in the style

of fairy stories and one was in the style of a kind of American naturalism, there was nevertheless

a kind of toughness there throughout. Was that truth difficult to create? It was difficult in the way that I had to reach back

and think about the things that were difficult for my mother,

and because many of the stories emotionally had their basis

in things that had happened to my own mother,

although it is fiction.

It was difficult because in creating stories that have to do with sorrow and pain, the writer has to experience that in writing

...