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, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I am honored to have as my guest, Don DeLillo, the author most recently of Cosmopolis,

published by Scribner's. I've been reading him from practically the beginning.

I read his second novel, Enzone, first, and then the paperback of Americana, but then all of them in a row.

Great Jones Street, Ratner Star, players, Running Dog, the Names, White Noise, Libra, Maltu, Underworld, the body artist, and now Cosmopolis.

I've been noticing that whereas the other, the earlier books, had centered principle, or what you might say was no God.

These books seem to have some sort of mysterious voice that at least some of the experts that appear in the course of Cosmopoulos would seem to

regard as a spiritual source.

I think my writing changed when I started working on the names, which comes somewhere in the middle of my body of work.

And I think it happened for a complex set of reasons, one of which is that I was living

abroad in Greece and working very much from what was around me on an almost hour-to-hour basis, far more than I'd ever done.

That is, I was exposed to new languages, new sites, new people, new customs, and it was

terrifically invigorating for me, and it would enter my work in a way that hadn't

happened before. I was much more conscious of the discipline I needed, the level of concentration

I needed, and it was the new setting that established this in my mind. I think I'd become a little fatigued in a curious way

that's not only creative but almost spiritual,

fatigued in part by my own work, by my own mind,

...