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'm pleased to have as my guest, Edwij Dantica.

She is the author most recently of The Doobraker, which is a set of interconnected stories published by Knav.

She is the author as well in order of the novel, Breath, Eyes Memory, Crick Crack, a book

of short stories, a second novel, The Farming of Bones.

And I wanted to begin by saying that most of the time that interconnected story idea seems

made up.

They don't want to say it's a novel, but they don't want to say it's not, and so they say

nothing.

But here, because ignorance is the subject and people learning

secrets of identity, the spaces between the stories seem to be as important as the stories

themselves, and our reorientation in time seems to be part of the strategy for how these stories are told.

I wondered if that's true.

Well, that's absolutely true, and that the design, if anything, of the collection,

it was meant to be a series of testimonials, really, or the unraveling of a man

through different eyes. So you have these people who see him, or I think they see him,

him being the central character, the do-breaker. So people think they see him. And it seemed like

...