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.

Today I'm pleased to have as my guest someone I've wanted to meet for a long time.

His name is Jeff Dyer.

His most recent book has been published by Pantheon.

It's called Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It.

His first book published in America was But Beautiful, a book about jazz.

It was followed by Out of Shear Rage, Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence, and a novel called Paris Trance.

And he's on that thrilling edge between prose

and poetry, between criticism and fiction, between seems to be the word for him. When he writes

about books, he writes about all the right people, Bernhardt, Ashbury, recently Seabult.

He's become the book critic for the L.A. Weekly and other places around the country,

and I thought it would be very interesting to get to know him. Now, this book is kind of the reverse of a book like Alex Garland's The Beach in that.

It takes you to some of the same places, Cambodia, Bali, but it's really looking for more nothing wherever it goes.

And I wondered about that as a precept for travel.

It's interesting that comparison with the beach, because for me, when I read that book for the first 40 or 50 pages, I was thinking, wow, this is amazing, this is going to be a great book.

And I assumed that the whole narrative of the This is going to be a great book. And I assumed

that the whole narrative of the book was going to be the search for the beach. And to my astonishment,

...