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.

Hi, this is Michael Silverblatt, and welcome to Bookworm.

Today my guest is Benjamin Weissman,

whose first collection of short fiction,

Dear Dead Person, has just been published by

High Risk Books, a Division of Serpent's Tale.

Oh, well, given the theme song,

which praises human beings for being animals that think,

reason, and read, it leads me to your own fiction where human beings are other kinds of animals.

I wondered what attracts you to the animal and brutal nature of the human? You know, we kill and eat and then, you know, have sex a lot and basic stuff.

Does the subject matter of the fiction matter to you? Because when I was going through

the collection, I found myself thinking that the events in the stories provide occasions

for extraordinary uses of language, a lot of surprises, but that the anxiety invoked by the material itself is there to inspire the writer

to his craziest kind of linguistic creativity.

Well, I mean, I think that the writing of the stories is like a formal problem or, you know, pushing and pushing and putting pressure on sentences to sort of get them to be peculiar and surprising and maybe begin at point A and end up at Q or somewhere where I didn't really expect them to go.

But I might, you know, write stories that I want to read or stories I don't really see anywhere.

You know, and I like reading about sex and I like reading about violence.

I enjoy the metro section.

And I like, you know, crime stories and Scorsese and...

...