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.

Hi, this is Michael Silverblatt, and welcome to Bookworm.

My guest today is Bruce McPherson, the publisher of McPherson and Company.

And I wanted to talk a little bit about this press, because I think they published very special books.

I first ran into them with a book called

the iguana by Maria, Anna Maria Ortizzi. It was such an odd book beginning as it did as a sort

of fairy tale with voyages and explorations and an oddly human iguana who serves as a servant for two evil

brothers. And then the book begins to do what I like books to do. It starts to burn up and

disintegrate and fracture in different ways. I thought, well, who published this? I later found another book of theirs called The Heat Death of the Universe by Pauline Zoline.

And then I heard that McPherson and Company was going to be issuing, for the first time in America,

some of the stories and novels of Mary Bots.

Mary Bots is virtually unknown here, but she was always one of those writers who was mentioned when people would

compile lists of neglected classics. John Ashbury, for instance, would talk about Mary

Butts. I always wondered, who is she, and what a name?

How did you find her?

She was originally brought to me by a poet named Robert Kelly,

whose fiction I've been publishing since 1985.

And a couple of years ago, one summer, he handed me two books.

One was The Diary of A. O. Barnabuth by Valerie Larbeau, a French author from the turn of the century.

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