Summary
ABC (Pantheon)
In this novel, a series of unlinked personal, familial and global catastrophes leads unrelated victims to search for order. Mysteriously, the "order" they discover is alphabetical order. So many cultures begin their alphabets with ABC. Why? What revelation is concealed in the alphabet's code?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation. |
| 0:07.0 | You are a human animal. |
| 0:11.0 | You are a very special breed, |
| 0:15.0 | or you are the only animal, |
| 0:18.3 | who can think, who can reason, who can read. |
| 0:21.6 | From KCRW Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt and this is Bookworm. |
| 0:27.6 | Today my guest is someone I've long to talk to for a very long time. |
| 0:33.6 | His name is David Plant. |
| 0:35.6 | His new book is called ABC and it's published by Pantheon. |
| 0:41.1 | He is the author as well. I'm not going to go from first to last. There are around 14 novels, |
| 0:48.6 | but the first, which had attracted my attention by its very title, was the Ghost of Henry James. His second |
| 0:56.6 | slides had a cover by David Hockney that was very beautiful. And before I knew it, he was writing a |
| 1:02.8 | trilogy, the family, the woods, the country. And at that point, people began to find David Plant, a writer that if you read |
| 1:15.8 | once, you would want to read because the effects and conditions of his novels were so extraordinarily |
| 1:24.3 | special, precise. people would alternate between saying radiant and harrowing. |
| 1:35.0 | But I think that Philip Roth, who said harrowing, was as correct as the people who would say |
| 1:42.2 | radiant. And now his novel ABC has come out. |
| 1:46.8 | And I wanted to begin by asking you, I've been rereading some of the books. |
| 1:54.1 | And from the very beginning, not just by title, ghosts have been important to you. |
| 2:02.2 | In one form or another, they appear in almost all of the books. |
| 2:08.8 | You know, I'm not as aware of that as you are because I haven't read my novels. |
| 2:14.2 | Once they've finished, I put them away. |
... |
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