Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without Goodell's in bird?

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is bookworm.

You know, the novel as a form.

Once was called the novel, because it comes from the word for news,

and it gave us news of the world around us, the world we're living in.

And Barbara Kingsolver, who is my guest, has written a novel that is very much concerned with giving us the news about the way we live now.

The novel is called Unsheltered, and I thought it was marvelous because, like, many people, I'm frequently afraid of the way we're having to live now.

I'm, you know, someone who has made an effort to know the homeless people in my neighborhood, to bring them food, to understand that we as a culture have gotten used to neglecting what's around us.

Well, unsheltered takes, in the present tense, two people, a husband and wife. He is a

professor. The college has shut down. He had tenure. He finally had tenure. He finally had

tenure. And then the college closed. And likewise, Willa, who's a journalist, his wife, finally felt secure in her profession.

She was a very good editor at a magazine, a very good magazine, which folded.

And so what do you do as they, the characters themselves, say, when you've done all the right things and you've lived by all the rules you know?

And you reach middle age and you have nothing.

Yeah, I wanted to write about the moment we're living in, in which so many kinds of shelter are failing

us, the ones, the kinds of shelter that we've just counted on, that there will be a job at the

end of a college degree, that there will be good health care when you get to be old.

I'm watching the people I know, the families all around me,

...