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.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

I'm Michael Silverblatt, and today I'm very pleased and excited because Dave Eggers has come

to talk to us about what is the what, the autobiography of Valentino Acheck Ting.

It's published by McSweeney's, and it's a remarkable, extraordinary

book, both as a human document and as a piece of literature. I wanted to begin by talking about

the kind of book it is, because it seems to me that right now there are many kinds

of novels that tell us about things that we already know and that this is a time when we

need to discover more about the world around us that we don't know.

And this book is one of the ways in which something that we are uninformed about by and large,

or at least as a culture, as a mass, is arriving to us.

You know, that's what it was for me too um i had never really done anything like this uh and i sort

of took the same journey that i'm hoping that you know a reader might take with it and in terms of

you know not writing about something that i was i you know left left my comfort zone, I guess, and, um, uh,

had to do years of homework and, and try to translate that into, you know, something sensible

and something, uh, compelling for, you know, American or English readers. And, uh, so I think that it, but, you know, it's something that it interests me more than, I don't know,

I guess I'm not, some of the stuff I've written before, I guess I look back on it.

And even though it was an incredible struggle and not much fun to write a lot of times,

...