Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

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.

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

I'm very pleased to have as my guest today, Gary Indiana, whose new novel, The Shanghai

Gesture, has recently been published by $2.00 Radio.

Gary, Indiana, is a guest that I've longed to have on the show.

He's the author of several books of short stories, novels, essays,

and his recent collection of essays, Utopia's Debris,

was published a little bit before the Shanghai gesture from basic books.

He's been the primary reporter of the underground, the dissociation of cultures, the new behavior.

There is a sense that if you want to understand what has happened in America, you would have to read Gary, Indiana.

And this newest book is a leap forward.

It's a ferrago.

It involves time travel, adventure, the movies,

archetypes of man, woman, eros, thanatos. It's a lark. It's a densely woven

book, but it's a book with a genuine difference, it seems to me.

The kind of thing that began the modernist sensibility was the understanding that henceforth

our lives are fragments and ruins.

Then, in a sense, postmodernism begins with the sense that those fragments and ruins can be put into a collage.

...