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Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Zintuberg.

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we be without books? From KCRATORical question, sir, but where would we be without books?

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

Today, David Shields is our guest. His new book is how literature saved my life.

One of his enterprises seems to me to be to provoke me. He's someone

who feels that the novel is not just on hiatus, it's transformed. There may be certainly writers,

but they're not the exciting ones writing novels just now. But my question is, why did

your life need saving, or how literature saved my life from what? I would say from dead language,

that, as you know, Michael, I wrote a novel quite a while ago called Dead Languages that deals with my stutter,

that as a kid I had a horrible stutter and still have the remnants of a stutter now.

And I feel that, you know, people think, oh, well, that's interesting.

You have a slight stutter, but really the definition of being human is that you can use language. It's virtually

the thing that distinguishes us from apes, is that we have verbal language. And so when you

have a profound stutter, you really are, in many ways, not fully human. And so I feel like a major

project of my whole life has been to transform,

you might say, dead language into, I hope, beautiful language of writing and reading.

And so I would say in general, stuttering to writing is one of the main ways the literature has saved my life.

Well, that's interesting. What did you do on the actual level to handle the stutter? Because,

...