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.

Hi, and welcome to Bookworm.

This is Michael Silverblatt.

Today, my guest is Dale Peck, the author most recently of the law of encosures, and before

that a novel called Martin and John.

Both of them are, were published by Faris Strauss and Giroux.

Because the closest thing to a statement of method or ours, Poetica, for

better or worse, is in the final chapter of Martin and John, I've asked Del Peck to read from

that chapter for us. This is Del Peck reading the final chapter of his novel Martin and John.

Sometimes you have to start over. The stories you make up for yourself don't seem to have any

relevance to the life you lead. The horrors you imagined pale beside the ones you experience,

and in your mind there's a battle as it tries to find something

to grab onto, whether it's a memory of something that happened or a memory of something

you imagined, a story you told yourself. I remember making up my first stories at night,

kept awake by the sound of my parents fighting in the other room. Every fiction is always opposed

to some truth, and the opposition in these stories was easy to spot, for they were about a happy

mother, happy father, happy John. But this changed. Soon the stories I imagined were as horrible

as the one I lived. I found a power in it, and that power

increased as the imagined horror became more and more like the events of my life. You can search

...