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 Deborah Eisenberg.

She's the author most recently of a book of short stories all around Atlantis.

It is, in fact, her third book of short stories.

The first two were transactions in a foreign currency and under the 82nd Airborne, those two collections have been

translated in a big paperback called The Stories So Farah of Deborah Eisenberg. The books

are published by Faris Strauss and Giroux. Well, seven more stories, probably seven years of work,

yes?

Correct.

And it still takes you as long to write a short story as you once told me it does.

Yes, it still takes me a year more or less.

I mean, you'd think by this time I'd have figured out how to do it, but I haven't.

Well, I wouldn't think that, in fact.

But what I am curious about, you once mentioned to me

that you remember absolutely nothing about your childhood.

Zero.

In fact, so little that I don't even remember

...