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 have one of my favorite guests in the studio.

It's E.L. Doctoro.

His new book is Sweetland Stories.

It's a collection of five short stories.

Among them, they've won just about every award. A short story can win on its initial publication. The book is, to my mind, a whole new event in the doctoral world,

in that these stories seem to me to be about the kind of people who are American heroes only within the last seven or eight or ten years.

Their stories have been previously entablots. In a way, I know some folk songs about some of these

types. There's one about Mrs. Dyer, the wretched baby farmer, a British folk song, and one of these

women in Sweetland stories has a house on the plains, in which, to which she invagals, old bachelors, people

with money, and, you know, like the widows and arsenic and old lace, she and her son buried

them there. And we follow with a person who's been driven to the extreme of stealing a baby from a hospital

to a woman who, in marriage after unhappy marriage to tattoo artists.

And I think this is a book about Americans and their desperate attempt to fail to put a family together.

That's interesting.

They're sort of loose gravel, aren't they, these people?

And it is true that women are the dominant characters in these stories.

...