Hereby Monsters is a podcast about facing the unknown. I, uh, I start to float, float away from the earth. Have you ever smoked crack before? We're all kind of frantically searching for meaning. They have the neurotransmitters. I think we're all jugglers in some way. Yo, we're not broken. Crazy delinquents. We're in our last day, young man. Listen to Hear Be Monsters.

The podcast about the unknown.

On the KCRW iTunes page.

Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannon Foundation.

Boots.

Well, we're there with me, with Lannin Foundation. Boots. Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timber.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we be without books?

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

This for me is a very special bookworm. We have as our guest, Don DeLillo, whose new novel,

Zero K, came out on the third, and so we're among the first people to be able to talk directly with Don DeLillo about his new book. You've mentioned

that your books begin with a particular spark or image. What began zero K for you?

Well, zero K began with a false image. It was an image that I found quite interesting of a gathering

of high-rise buildings with nothing around them and a river just flowing past

somewhere in a wilderness, modern buildings, a cluster of perhaps six or seven, no sign of people.

And I wondered where this would take me, and it turns out that it took me nowhere. I had to think a little further and somehow

ended up in a kind of desert waste in a very distant part of the world, the area of Uzbekistan

and its neighboring states.

Well, in addition, these buildings went underground by the time they reached the novel, yes?

In effect, that's what happened.

...