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.

From KCRW Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and welcome to Bookworm.

Today I have as my guest, Colm Tobein, whose collection of short stories, mothers and sons

has just been published in paperback from Scribner. I was regretting that we

hadn't discussed this book together when it came out in hardcover, but I feel fortunate because

the paperback edition has an additional story in it, which I think is very beautiful called

1 minus 1, and which acts in a way as a culmination to the themes in the earlier stories.

Now, all of these stories have mothers and sons, and what led to the creation of this first book of short stories with this theme?

I had a story called a priest in the family, and it is a story which really is an intervention

in a debate in Ireland and elsewhere, including the United States, about the whole business

of pedophil priests and about people who suddenly one moment are in great authority

are the most respected people in the population and suddenly become the most despised. And I thought really

just to the ages of fiction to have a look at that and say, yes, but what would it be like if you were

the mother of a priest who was accused of that what would it be

like for her i'm not saying she's a victim too i'm just saying this is an interesting little thing

you could do in a story to tell it from her side and when i'd written it i realized one of the problems

with short stories is that certainly in in um Ireland and England, people are not reading them in the same

ways they're reading novels. I thought that's a real pity that no one will read this story,

you know, me having gone to all the trouble of writing it. I don't mean vast numbers of people,

...