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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 Silverblad, and today I'm honored to have us my Castile Doctoro,

whom I've been reading as his books have appeared since the book of Daniel.

He's the author as well, of course, of Ragtime and Lund Lake,

Lives of the Poets, a book of short stories or impulses toward novels,

World's Fair, Billy Bathgate, The Waterworks, and now City of God.

And I wanted to begin by asking a virtually impossible question to begin with.

But you say that this figure of a cross that has a brass cross that has been stolen from a church in New York

and found on the tarred roof of a progressive evolutionary Judaism synagogue in Manhattan centered the 12 or so light motifs that you've been working with in the book.

And I found myself by the end of the book, given that it is a kind of mystery,

feeling, one, that in a peculiar sense in this book, that God is the culprit, and two, wanting to

know more about how that cross brings the book together?

I would immediately think of the way the book got started.

I was in a church.

There was some sort of anti-apartheid ceremony several years ago in a church in New York.

And there was a rather large brass cross behind the altar, and it was slightly askeue.

And it had what the wall under the cross had not received the latest paint job,

...