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.

I have two guests today.

They are Jennifer Egan and Duff Brenna.

Jennifer Egan is the author of Emerald City, Duff Brenna.

My first guest is the author of the Holy Book of the Beard.

It's from Doubleday.

It's a Nane-Tales book from Doubleday, which usually says something special is about

to happen, these special editorial imprints.

And in a sense, something has.

This is a genuinely odd book, it seems to me.

In the same way that Schaucer once wrote the Parliament of Fowls in which a bunch of barnyard critters sit around arguing matters of life and morality and death.

So to hear you have a bunch of ramshackle, raffish, lackluster guys who are debating divinity, it seems, and art in the equivalent of a pigsty.

And I wondered how it started.

How the whole thing came about in my mind.

Actually, the whole, came about in my mind.

Actually, the story started with the two characters, Jasper John and Henry Hank.

I wanted to write a novel about a young man being tempted to fall, if you will, by an older man.

...