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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.

I'm Michael Silverblad, and today it's my honor and pleasure to have as my guest,

Evan S. Connell.

He has written his, I believe, 17th book, Deus LoVolt, which means God wills it, a chronicle of

the Crusades. In his enormously impressive body of work, it follows from the kinds of historical

recreations that he has done in quite a few books,

including The Alchemist Journal, Son of the Morning Star, A Long Desire, and The White Lantern.

These are pursuits of passions.

They are extraordinary accumulations of knowledge on various historical subjects.

Evan S. Cannell is, of course, the author of Mr. Bridge and Mrs. Bridge, of the connoisseur,

and the collected stories has recently been published by the publisher of Deus Loeufault, Counterpoint. And among those stories are some that I

consider to be some of the best modern American stories. The first story in that book, Arturus, is a personal favorite.

What I noticed when reading this extraordinary book, which let me try and describe it,

a narrator who doesn't actually enter the story until around halfway through is telling the stories of the crusades.

They are crusades that his father and uncles have gone on, and now he is venturing on one himself.

Paragraph by paragraph, there's no slack, whatever,

like the Mr. and Mrs. Bridge books, these books are made entirely out of accuracies, a parade that seems so unknowable that the reader, at least me, kind of reels back in a state of

...