Hey, this is the moment. I'm Brian Cobleman. Thanks for listening. My guest today is

Bryn Jonathan Butler and I think this will be unique

because Bryn we never met before

though we've communicated and I only became familiar with your work

this year but became an enormous fan you know I get asked

to do blurbs all the time and somehow this book showed up from your editor and I

know your editor a little bit and he he was like would you read this book and I sat down and I felt blown across the room man and I started telling everyone I knew about it and wrote you online and gave you a blurb and then invited you on because I thought I thought that the book the name of which is the Grandmaster that's not the whole name

I get uncomfortable because you don't have control over the title and

subtitles the Grandmaster the match that made chess great again and I'm not a chess

guy and and also right it is the thing this is a book ostensibly about and it is about

Magnus Carlson who at a very young age became not only Grandmaster but the best chess

player in the world and arguably the best chess player of all time but

What Brennan is able to do in this book is bring you into the way Bryn sees the world through

These other people. And man, you took incredible risks

in writing this book as an artist.

And I felt inspired and awakened as an artist reading it and I think for any artist

it has certain similarities to me to the Murakami book what I talk about when I talk

about running even though you're not at all putting yourself in it that way

but your exploration of obsession and of commitment and the discursive way in which you write the book,

meaning the way in which you take us into all the different

down on many tributaries to come back

to answering this question of the value of this kind of obsession

...