Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timberd.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we need without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I'm thrilled to have as my guest, Chris Adrian.

His new novel, The Great Night, is one of the reading experiences that I've most treasured in the last year.

It's published by Faris Strauss and Cheru.

I loved it because it combines the real world with a fantastic world and asks where they meet.

Its occasion is midsummer night in San Francisco, in Buena Vista Park, and Titania and her fairies from a Midsummer Night's dream are in court. Their world is ending again, and once again, three heartbroken people in the play, it's four heartbroken lovers,

are wandering into the forest to have revelations about themselves.

Well, tell me where this all began.

Situate me, please.

Well, I think it started from, I guess, a convergence of a few different things.

One was a longstanding ambition or desire to retell a Shakespeare story, I guess just because

I thought that that would be neat to do. And I had thought about a couple

different plays as candidates, but though I had the sort of armature of a story in the plays

that I was thinking of pirating, I didn't have an actual story to go inside that armature.

So I had that in the back of my head, I think even before I came to San Francisco for the first time, which was in 2001.

...