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.

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

Today I'm happy to have as my guest, Chris Adrian, who's the author most recently of the Children's Hospital,

which has been published by McSweeney's books.

He's the author as well of a previous novel, Gob's Grief.

The Children's Hospital is a truly unique book.

It is set in the immediate, the proximate future, and it is about what happens in a children's hospital when one day the waters begin to rise, they eventually become seven miles deep.

The children's hospital begins to metamorphose and become something of an arc

floating on the deep at the end of the world. The hospital is filled with 699, which becomes 700 children,

some additions later,

and many pediatricians, young doctors, medical students,

trying to make the preparations for whatever it is that may face them as they possibly form a new society.

Now, the author not only got his degree in writing from the University of Iowa, he is as well a pediatrician, and he has been studying theology at Harvard University.

And so he's signally the right person to have written the book.

Can you tell me when it started?

It's a monumental effort, almost, I think, as long as the Magic Mountain.

Oh, I started it a while ago in med school.

I was having a bad time working on the first novel and was ready to give up, and so decided to start something else and ended up starting this goofy

...