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, this is Michael Sulfurblad, and this is KCRW's Bookworm, our weekly book show.

Today I have with me in the studio, David Levitt, whose new novel, Equal Affections,

just came out this month from Widenfeld and Nicholson, a relatively new publisher.

It's his first book with that publisher. His earlier

books were Family Dancing and The Lost Language of Cranes. David, welcome to Bookworld.

Thank you. This show has a special way of wanting to care, at least, about writers whose formative experiences

were in some way Californian. You were raised in Palo Alto, and you stayed here.

Well, I think my, I was about three and a half when my parents moved to Palo Alto.

Excuse me for coughing.

I had laryngitis after three weeks of talking.

And basically grew up there, and my family's still there.

It's kind of an interesting thing because California has more and more,

after being a place where writers like Jack London came from,

a place where people expected writers were writing about foreign experience,

London's in Africa, excuse me, in Alaska, or Steinbecks on the road with farmers and the migrants.

We're now discovering a Californian kind of writer, like Amy Hample, for instance, or yourself, or Betty Nellis, who are bringing back in some sense,

do you think a sensibility that may have been very much formed out here?

Well, I certainly think all writers are drawn back to the place where they grew up.

And I'm not sure if I would call it a sensibility as simply a world.

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