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 am very honored to be with Eduardo Galliano in the library of the Lannin Foundation,

one of my favorite places in the world.

Eduardo Galliano was the first awardee of the Lennon Cultural Freedom Prize, and we're here to talk about his new book, Mirror's Stories of Almost Everyone, which has been published

by Nation Books. I think it's a remarkable book. I've been

speaking to Eduardo for some years now, three or four times about his books, and in fact, I am guilty.

I said to his agent, Susan Berkholz, if Eduardo keeps writing his surrealist dream books, we are going to see him lose the significance of his work.

And she said to me, I agree with you, but don't worry. We have to trust

Eduardo. And then came mirrors aspejos, which I think is one of the most profound of his books,

second only to memories of fire. And it is a mosaic, and ongoing mosaic that takes us from the beginning

of time, from creation myths, to virtually the present, watching culture evolve.

Now as is always true of Eduardo Galliano, chaos, the primal chaos, is his home,

and what we watch is differentiation, that as soon as we evolve, so to speak, to male and female, to king and peasant, to better and better still,

serf and noble, we watch culture devolve.

Now I thought that one of the ways to express this would be to begin with an actual piece from the book mirrors

because it begins with a creation myth and we see what our world has turned mythology into.

It's a particularly good section because everyone now goes to places like

...