You're about to hear a show taped earlier this year with Deborah Eisenberg.

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Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timberr. It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and welcome to Bookworm. My guest is Deborah Eisenberg, whom I have the privilege of having spoken to, I think, from the time of her first book all around Atlantis, yes? Well, my very first book was transactions

in foreign currency, but we have been talking for a long time. Debbie has a cold, and I think it's

only because this is bookworm, that she has surrendered her bed.

She does have a glass of tea.

Her new book is called Your Duck is My Duck, and it's a book of short stories, six of them.

Deborah's short stories have been amazing since she figured out how to write the first of them.

I'd say that the most recent stories are asking questions about language and what it has become in our predatory, insincere,

and awful times.

There's actually a very unusual and great story called the third tower in which a character

who has too many thoughts, too vibrant, is taught just to call a tree a tree. Language is removed from her because her excesses are conceived of as

unnecessary. This is to be the result of this story, a world without poetry, a world without the imagination of literature.

Tell me, how did that story come into existence?

Well, actually, it's a total mystery to me. That was the last written of these stories. And I don't really know where it came from except from the conditions that you just described so perfectly.

And I would say that just sheer rage wrote the story and despair.

Of course, it's sort of a funny story or... They're all funny.

Yes, I think so.

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