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

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

I'm here today to speak with Brian Hall, the author most recently of Fall of Frost.

It's a novel about the life of Robert Frost. It's an attempt to

speculatively recreate the thought and imagery that runs through Frost between his life

and his poetry.

It's an immensely difficult feat to imagine and to accomplish,

but one thinks of it as being within the realm of capability of Brian Hall,

who, in his I should be extremely happy in your company, managed to enter the brains of Lewis and Clark and the Native Americans

guiding them on their tour and creating an extraordinary American depressive landscape that described

the need to explore.

Now, in the case of Frost, I have the feeling that at a certain point you really felt I've got him. I know my man.

If the book does give that impression, I'm glad to hear it because this is the sort of thing that can only ride or fall on probably the internal confidence of the author.

And I did feel, and only various readers will decide for themselves, but I did feel eventually

that I could make the crucial decisions that internally I needed to make about, you know, what is the

likely direction of thought and imagery I want to go in here.

Now, would you do me a favor and read the epigraph of this novel?

Because it very much, I feel it generates the novel

...