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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 and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and welcome to Bookworm.

Today I have with me, Shang-R-Lee.

He's the author of The Surrendered.

It's published by Riverhead.

Chang-Rae-Lee is the author of three previousrendered. It's published by Riverhead. Changre Lee is the author of three previous

and highly acclaimed novels. Those are native speaker, a gesture life, and a loft. And now we have The Surrendered, a novel about the decades-long heartbreaking aftermath of the Korean War.

Like his other novels, it is a novel about the after effects of war, but this time not on people who are coping,

on people who are dragging themselves through their suffering at a very, very deep level,

as if this time the unconscious effects of war are going to reach the novelist and the reader

and not be repressed into what Chang Reilly previously called a gesture life.

Tell me, how did you manage to write a book that's so emotional and so profound?

I remember seeing some prints by Goya called The Dis disasters of war. I don't know if you're

familiar with those. We know, of course, his famous painting, the 3rd of May, where they have

that wild-haired, white-shirted person in front of this firing squad. But these prints were just

these little line sketches of cruelty, of suffering,

a heap of women's bodies. I remember those, and of course, those prints prefigure a lot of

photographs that I saw later on of Japanese incursions in Manchuria and China.

...