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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, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblad, and today I'm very happy to have as my guest,

Cynthia Ossick.

I've been waiting to talk to her about her own work for quite some time, although we did

talk together about Isaac Babel.

She is the author, most recently, of heir to the glimmering world.

It's a novel published by Houghton Mifflin, who are her new publishers and who have also

reissued at last her first novel, Trust. Her book of essays, Quarrel and quandary, won the National Book Critics Circle Award last year.

She has several other books of essays, including Fame and Folly and Art and Artur.

Her novellas published before but collected together in the shawl have lived a long life of their own as extraordinary, emotion-filled pictures of the life of a particular woman who has lived through the Holocaust.

Her book, A Pickarest, The Putter Method Papers, details the more modern life of a kind of woman who's worked for the city and is dealing with the possibilities of mystical intervention. She even brings a golem to life.

In heir to the glimmering world, a young woman, Rose Meadows, comes to serve in the home of the Mithwissers.

Rudolph, his wife, their five children.

The Mitzers are a family of refugees. They are almost atheist, and yet they are studying, or at least the professor, Dr. Mitzhruzzer, Rudolph, is studying the Karaits. They are a heretical

Jewish sect. His wife has been thrown out before exile. She's been a physicist. And they are now

living in upstate New York.

Into their lives will also come the boy who inspired a famous book of children's writing.

In fact, many of them, he's the equivalent of Christopher Robin, in this book. Now, I wanted to start, Cynthia,

...