Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed

for 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 my guest is Francis Sherwood, the author most recently of the Book of Splendor,

a novel published by W.W. Norton.

She's the author as well of everything you've heard is true. It was her first book,

a book of short stories, Vindication, and Green. She's won several O. Henry Awards. The reviews for the Book of Splendor were so interesting that I thought I had really ought

to read this book.

And she does in this book something she'd started to do in her novel Vindication, which

was an imagined life inspired by the life of Mary Wollstonecraft. I always say it wrong. Here, we're dealing with

Prague in 1601. There is an emperor, Rudolph, who is something of a mad emperor, a sullen solemn babyish, willful, wimful emperor.

There are, there's a golem, there are all kinds of invocations and history and fantasy

and comedy in particular intermingle to make this a very unusual novel.

Now, sometimes the scenes in this book have the quality of some of the scenes from Mel Brooks' historical movies.

Was that an intentional effect?

No, and I'm flattered that you compare me in any way to Mel Brooks, but I do like to write

humorously, or I don't set out to do that, but when people tell me that was funny,

I'm surprised and delighted.

Because, you know, there are things that are something like the famous scene in the Marx Brothers

...