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.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm. This is Michael Silverblatt. Today my guest is David

Shields, the author most recently of Remote, published by Alfred Knopf. He's the author of a book

of short stories, a handbook for drowning, a novel Dead Languages, and an earlier novel,

Heroes. Recently, at lunch, a waiter seeing me read remote came up to me and told me that he had

loved dead languages, and I asked him, well, you know, what did you love about it?

And he said, well, it's about a boy who stutters and his relationship to a mother who is in control of language.

She's a writer, and that relationship had impressed itself on him over six years.

I get the feeling that David Shields is a writer that people are slowly discovering.

At any rate, the news about him spreads more slowly than other news does.

And I thought that this has become, in a sense, the subject of remote.

The condition of being a writer, which is to say, to be in the culture that includes the possibility of fame and not yet to be famous.

So it's a book of resentment, condescension, cultural analysis, hijinks on the subject of what becomes famous.

How did you come to write it?

Well, I think you've almost described how I've come to write it in the sense that I think you're

exactly right, Michael, that in a way the book is sort of born, in a way, of envy, or resentment,

or anger, or shot and frod, or some kind. So in a way, the book sort of was born by feeling

marginalized as a writer. I mean, the feeling, first of all, sort of marginalized from

...