Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timberg.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we be without books?

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

Today I'm very happy to have Francine prose with me.

She's the author of my New American Life.

It's a novel from Harper Collins.

And, you know, it is the funniest book I've read recently.

I used to read all kinds of books about immigrants coming to America, or usually the children of immigrants writing about their parents.

They had anything can happen by Helen and George Papa Shively,

in which mom and dad from Anatolia learned that you can't sleep in American parks overnight

or the education of Hyman Kaplan.

This is a first-person novel by a woman named Lula, who's telling us what it's like to be in America,

but it's not a new America.

What it is, the surprise and the hilarity of this book, is that she arrives in an America

that doesn't know how to suffer the way she knows how to suffer, having come from

the old world, war-torn, terror-torn. She is ready to instruct the people she works for in what

the future is going to be like. It's an original comic premise, and it's hilarious. How did you

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