You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

for 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 Bob Chicoches, the author most recently of the novel, Swimming in the Volcano,

the author as well of two books of short stories.

The first one was Easy in the Islands, which won the American Book Award,

and the second was The Next New World.

Swimming in the Volcano is published by Scribner's.

This is a sort of special show today because I invited Jamie Diamond,

a fiction writer and journalist who had studied with Bob Chicoches,

to help participate in the interview.

Jamie Diamond's fiction has appeared in Plow Shares in the quarterly.

She's done journalism in the New York Times Arts and Leisure Section

and is a contributing editor of Lears.

Jamie, would you like to ask the first question?

Sure.

In the beginning of your novel, you have a prologue with a rather eloquent

evocative experience in a volcano, swimming in the

middle of a volcano. And in that chapter, you describe the volcano as being in the stage of metamorphizing

from beauty to beast. And I wonder what you meant by that. And is that of you of the novel? Oh, sure. I mean,

...