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Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timberd.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we need without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and you're listening to Bookworm.

Today, I'm going to be talking about an extraordinary book.

It's called The Heart of a Stranger. It's an anthology of exile literature. And, you know, once upon a time, that was an inevitable subject when we were

talking about Joseph Conrad, who wrote in English when his

native language was Polish, or about Vladimir Nabokov when he was an exiled Russian aristocrat,

native language Russian wrote first in German and then in English. But here we have an anthology.

I think it's one of the most remarkable anthologies I've ever read. It takes us from the ancient

Greeks up to the present and shows us how much of the world

has been living in exile. Odysseus's return to Greece at the end of the Trojan War

is the story of a man going from an island to island exile.

Sometimes the exiles in this book are like the Britishers in Africa.

They're exiles in paradise.

They are really...

What is the expression you found for this, Andre?

Parasites.

...