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.

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

There's a new group of poets known as Flarfus, F-L-A-R-F-I-S-T-S, who enter random words into

their Google and create poems out of the entries that appear.

These florifics are just one example of the new writing that's been emerging.

It's controversial because it trashes literary form.

It may even violate copyright law.

This new writing is tired of old artificial structures like the novel.

It mixes fiction with nonfiction, poetry and essay.

It especially likes hybrid forms of autobiography, anything that shakes up and alters our sense

of reality.

My two guests today have written books that are great examples of this

new way of literary thinking and working. Ander Monson's vanishing point, not a memoir, published

by Grey Wolf, puts competing alternative realities about the author and his world into a blender.

David Shields has written Reality Hunger, a manifesto for the new writing.

The book is constructed for more than 600 short sections, many appropriated without attribution

from other writers. David, what characterizes this new writing? Well, Michael, if I might quote from my book, I thought this is an awfully good

description of it where I say the things that characterize it are randomness, open to accident

...