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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 need without books?

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

Today I'm very happy to have us my guest, George Saunders, particularly because I've been talking to George since he began writing.

And George Saunders is one of the inevitable cases where you have to say this is a guy who's grown as a writer

and that his most recent book, 10th of December, is his deepest.

Tell me, it's a crazy, unjustifiable question,

but how does it feel to know that your work is deepening? Well, it's really, it's good. I mean,

and, you know, Chris, the real benefit is that you feel it as you're doing it in other words it hasn't become a knee-jerk thing or habitual thing but you're

uh kind of genuinely puzzled every day when you go in like well i don't know what i still don't know

what i'm doing uh and the other really nice thing is that your actual concerns and fears and so on get in there. I think

if you were sort of not growing, you'd still be working off the old fears and desires and so on.

So this book in particular, I kind of was, you know, the last time we talked in the studio was

around the time of that essay collection and that got a little bit of

press and I and I also was during the Iraq War and I think I had my mind to kind of try to be a

more public writer you know I went on TV and stuff and and I was doing a lot of I was doing

some different kinds of writing some humor and screenwriting and stuff and then somewhere just

...