Hereby Monsters is a podcast about facing the unknown. I, uh, I start to float, float away from the earth. Have you ever smoked crack before? We're all kind of frantically searching for meaning. They have the neurotransmitters. I think we're all jugglers in some way. Yo, we're not broken. Crazy delinquents. We're in our last day, young man. Listen to Hear Be Monsters.

The podcast about the unknown.

On the KCRW iTunes page.

Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannon Foundation.

Boots.

Well, we'd be there without a Lannin Foundation. Boots. Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good? No, Timberd.

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 my guest is Garth Greenwell. His novel is What Belongs to You? It's published by

Faris Strauss and Giroux. It's a first book. It's a very

powerful book. And I'm going to do something unusual today because I have the feeling that between

what I would say the book is about and what Garth would say the book is about, there might be an abyss.

So tell me, what is the book about?

Oh, that's such a hard question.

Well, have fun with it.

Okay.

Well, you know, there's the story of the book, and that's easy to talk about.

I mean, the story is about what I hope.

I hope it's a kind of love story, but a strained and strange love story between an American

high school teacher living in Bulgaria and a younger Bulgarian man whom he meets in a public toilet

...