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.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm. My name is Michael Silverblatt, and today my guest is Eliza Minut.

She is the author of a first novel. It's called The Tiny One, and it's published by Knopf.

Now, ostensibly, and in reality,

it's about an eight-year-old child, a girl,

remembering the death of her mother

two days after that death.

As the book accumulates, though,

we realize in some way she spent a lifetime completing

her memories of this day, and that when we think about what we remember, truly, we remember

the amount of time we spend drifting off from the ostensible subject.

And so the oddest things come back to her, a girl who has told her that she's imagined a bunny rabbit, but with all ears, everywhere but its eyes.

And the little girl said, oh, you mean like a porcupine?

And the book has this way of creating out of memory these rather extraordinary creatures

that get amalgamated.

And so the book has a lot of surrealist and somewhat mad qualities.

And I wanted to begin by talking about those.

I think, yeah, I think there are a lot of surrealist mad qualities.

...