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 I'm very happy to have as my guest, Anna Castillo, who has been on Bookworm before

to the point that I consider her to be a friend, although we've spoken on the show only twice before.

We've had long conversations.

The new book is called The Guardians.

It's published by Random House,

and it's a very new book for Anna Castillo,

whose work includes books of poetry,

like my father was at Toltec,

books of essays.

She's published recently a novel and verse, watercoloured women, opaque men.

The last time we spoke to her, she had published a novel, Peel My Love, Like an Onion.

And this book strikes me as being a very different kind of book

because often her books are very poetic and involve artist figures

as a kind of poetic impressionism that goes through the book.

This is very much a sequential narrative, a real novel. And I wondered what led you to working really with

the bones of the novel. What happens next? Well, it is an interesting observation and not

...