Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Zintabird.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we need without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I'm very honored, thrilled, delighted to have as my guest, Edgar Carrot.

He is the best-selling young writer in Israel. His most recent collection

of stories is called Suddenly a Knock on the Door. Before that, there were the Nimrod Flipout

and the girl on the fridge. The stories are characterized by their extraordinary brevity.

And more than that, it seems as if you're capable of an enormously bountiful imagination. The stories that are in all kinds of genres, there's science fiction, there's daily life, there's the relationship of man to woman, divorcing people.

There are every kind of very brief encounter. Tell me, is there any kind of fiction that you

won't attempt? I think that when I start writing a story, I don't think of a genre or even the word

it takes place in.

It starts with some sort of an emotion or a feeling I find difficult to articulate.

So if the story begins with a guy sitting on a chair, I don't know what's going to happen when he

get up and open the door to his apartment, you know, on what planet will he be or what the story

will be like? But after a few sentences, you have some sort of a tone, and the tone kind of dictates

the ontology of the word. And you're following your imagination as it determines what will happen, word by word.

Yes, for sure.

...