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.

This is Michael Silverblatt.

Welcome, and today my guest is David Grossman.

He's the author most recently of The Zigzag Kid

and the author of several novels before it, The Smile of the Lamb,

See Under Love, the Book of Intimate Grammar.

I'm very happy to be able to announce to my listeners that The Smile of the Lamb, See Under Love, the Book of Intimate Grammar.

I'm very happy to be able to announce to my listeners that the ZigZag Kid,

although it has been published as a book like any of his authors,

is in fact a Bar Mitzvah book, a book written for his sons when they were about to be bar mitzvah. And so much of the writing about the book, which has criticized it for its lack of adult

constructions, are ignoring a basic fact that this is a world seen through a child's eyes.

Now it seems to me that every significant writer, or at least the ones I care

about, have the impulse to tell fables or children's stories. Even Nabokov translated Alice in Wonderland.

Kafka is always creating the investigations of a dog or Josephine the mouse singer, and there's an

interest in straddling the world of the child and the world of greater outside despair.

This is this contact with childhood what makes these writers in their way special.

So I wanted to begin by asking you, what were you telling your sons?

Shalom.

...