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, we continue our special series,

an American Bookworm in Paris,

recorded when I was in Paris

for the first time

as a guest of the cultural services

of the French embassy.

I'm with Camille de Toledo.

He is the author of a first book coming out in America called Coming of Age at the End of History,

published by Soft Skull.

He's also the author of two novels, parts of a tetralogy that await American publication,

the inversion of Hieronymus Bosch, and Lives and Death of an American terrorist.

Now, if I can describe the book Coming of Age at the end of history,

I would say it is a coming of age novel in the form of an intellectual autobiography. And it is examining in its three parts

the life of a young man who first falls prey, I suppose that is the word, to the kind of thinking about the spectacle that was made prominent

...