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 happy to have as my guest, Andrew Sean Greer, the author most recently of the

Confessions of Max Tivoli, which is a novel published by Faris Strauss-A-Juru.

He's the author as well of The Path of Minor Planets,

a novel published in paperback from Piccadour

and a collection of stories called How It Was for Me.

Now, as I started to read the Confessions of Max Tivoli, one of the things that I enjoyed,

it's set in, what is it, the 1870s.

Mm-hmm. At the beginning.

And one of the characters who's in California during the Gold rush, his way of saying that there are

grizzly folks prospectors as well as a kind of aristocracy.

He says that you could be there a member of the shovelry or the chivalry.

And by the end of the chapter, unless you've forgotten that, the word shivery comes up.

Yeah.

And you think to yourself, well, there's no particular reason that these, this trio of words should be running through this chapter and there to remind you that it was intentional

having, you know, the third word, shivery, almost a completely forgotten word, be there to point

to the sound of the words. So what we know is that we're reading a book where the kind of words

...