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Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No to bird.

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.

Today I have the pleasure of talking to Donald Antrim, whose newest book of short stories,

The Emerald Light in the Air, has recently been published by Faris Strauss and Giroux.

It's a book of seven stories, all of which have been prominently featured in the New Yorker magazine,

and five of which bear extraordinary relations to one another. And I found myself feeling that

the center five stories in the book meant a huge amount to me. I just loved reading them.

Their titles are Pond with Mud, Salas, Another Manhattan, He New, and Ever Since.

And what I found extraordinary about them is that they feature a depressive at the center, trying to make do.

The person is intelligent, witty, gentle, generous, sort of reminds me of Seymour Glass in the

Salinger novels. And I realized that we're living in a time when our own suffering is so great that writers are not writing fiction

about that sweet, gentle person. He was once a fixture on the American landscape. He was Elwood P. Dowd in the play Harvey,

somewhat alcoholic, used to be called manic depressive, now called bipolar. And I think that you,

Donald, suddenly, after three novels of high comedy and a very profound

memoir about your mother, you've turned to a new subject, which is how to live under the shadow

of a disorder that most of us refuse to see or talk about now.

...