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.

My name is Michael Silverblatt, and today my guest is Matthew Stadler.

He's the author most recently of a novel called Alan Stein, published by Grove Press.

He's the author previously of the sex offender, the dissolution of Nicholas D.

And Landscape Memory. Now, a novel by Matthew Stadler tends to stand as the culmination of three separate strands in his life,

the writing of the novel itself, a research project, and an erotic fascination.

And certainly in this novel, all three co-join, and in a sense, thrillingly, none of them work out.

And I began to wonder about why it is that a Matthew

Stadler novel, like Alan Stein, begins in research. I don't know why they begin research.

I'm usually writing a novel to come to some rich relation to something that vexes me,

and I think research must be part of my way of retaining contact with the thing that I'm looking at and investigating.

Typically, the research has been historical, or, yeah, I guess it has been historical.

In the case here, it is the discovery that Gertrude Stein had a nephew who was living in Paris and lived among the charmed circle,

who might have been the model for the boy

leading the horse in Picasso's famous painting. Now, is that an invented possibility or is it

taken that he is this boy? No, he's not William Rubin and John Richardson, who probably have written most authoritatively on it.

Neither one ever proposed. Alan Stein is remotely relevant to the boy leading a horse.

...