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.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

I'm Michael Silverblatt,

and today my guest is Ann Beatt.

Her new book of short stories,

Perfect Recall,

has been published by Scribner's,

and I think it's a perfect book.

Now, I am guilty of thinking that Anne Beattie becomes a better and more extraordinary writer with her every book.

And I must, in addition, say that Anne was the very first writer I ever interviewed.

And so it's a real pleasure to have her here whenever she joins us.

But I have to say that I think that the Bernard Malamud Award that she recently achieved for the short story is well-deserved,

and that this new book, Perfect Recall, is full of astonishments from someone who I thought

had astonished me enough already.

Now, it seemed relevant to mention Faulkner saying that writing fiction was

something like building a henhouse in a tornado, and it does seem to me that these stories

are hen houses built in a tornado, and that there's a certain kind of protection there

because if the henhouse doesn't get built, the tornado has certainly been achieved. And I wondered

...