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 Barati Mukherjee, the author of

The Holder of the World, most recently, published by Knopf.

She's the author as well of Yasmin and the Book of Short Stories, Middleman, which won the National Book Award.

But I have to tell my listeners that the entire day before this interview I've spent with

Holder of the World, absolutely transfixed by it.

It's brand new for you, isn't it?

This is the first historical book you've done, and it's kind of an adventure and kind of a saga and kind of a gender politics book and kind of a literary self-contained artifact.

And, you know, all of these things are brand new um i suppose they are and that all my novels

are covert or accidental autobiographies and so uh the novels become uh expressions of what

obsesses me at any given, at the time of writing.

And I'm one of those very socially aware, politically committed new Americans,

so that gender, politics, race, diaspora, especially, all feed themselves.

I hope in very dramatic ways and, you know, interesting in terms of narrative ways, into novels.

But before this, I remember last time we spoke, for instance, we spoke about paragraphs and the, you know,

kind of jumpy and edgy style of those earlier books, which are very contemporary and very jostled

with the presence of the whole melting pot and its refusal to be contained in normal sentences.

This book is, has very weird sentences in it too, but it's contained within the form, I don't know exactly what to say.

...