Brian Phillips: Impossible Owls
Bookworm
KCRW
4.5 • 606 Ratings
🗓️ 15 November 2018
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The restless imagination of Brian Phillips brings lyrical essays to a narrative border in his debut book, Impossible Owls.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation. |
| 0:03.8 | Boots! |
| 0:06.0 | Where would we be without books? |
| 0:12.0 | Where would we be without Gutenberg? |
| 0:16.0 | It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we be without books? |
| 0:23.5 | From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt. |
| 0:29.0 | This is Bookworm. |
| 0:30.5 | We have Brian Phillips with his book, Impossible Owls. |
| 0:36.9 | It's a book of essays. |
| 0:39.1 | Now, a wonderful publishing house, Faris, Strauss, and Giroux, |
| 0:43.7 | are publishing books that they fear that they won't fly. |
| 0:48.3 | They're too original. |
| 0:49.7 | They're too fresh. |
| 0:50.8 | They're too funny. |
| 0:52.0 | They're too surprising. |
| 0:52.9 | And so they put them in a paperback book. Now, what did they think they were getting? |
| 1:03.3 | That's a really good question. I hope they thought they were getting what they published because we put into the world the book |
| 1:13.1 | that I wanted to put into the world, which, as you know, in 2018, is not something writers can |
| 1:19.1 | take for granted going into a relationship with a publishing company. The first essay is about |
| 1:27.0 | a dog sled race in Alaska, one of the most dangerous such |
| 1:32.8 | in the world, let alone in Alaska. |
| 1:35.5 | The following essay is about sumo wrestling, but it is intercut with the narration of the death of... |
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