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 happy to be

with George Saunders, who has written three books of short stories, Pastoralia, Civil Warland

in Bad Decline, and In Persuasion Nation, as well as two books

of illustrated fables, the brief and frightening reign of Phil and the very persistent gappers

of Fripp, and now a new collection, which is a collection of essays, parodies, travel pieces, literary criticism called the Brain Dead Megaphone, published by Riverhead Books.

Now, along the way in this collection, while I think that what people remember most are travel pieces to Dubai and exploration

of the Mexican-American border in Texas and a trip to Nepal, there's a lot of talk about how

George Saunders came to be a writer. And of course course on Bookworm, well, we want to hear about that.

And it's very useful as well.

So I thought we'd talk about certain things that come up along the way in these essays, and then hear, well, how they all come together in a particular piece at the end of the program that George Saunders will read.

The first question I wanted to ask you, you say that when you started, you had a whole different sense that you didn't speak the language that a book speaks, that you had to be

something else in order to be a writer.

Yeah, it was, well, I grew up in Chicago on the south side, and even though that, you know,

that world was incredibly literary, it wasn't the world that I saw in books. So I had this idea

that you would have to, you know, that a book would be that, it would be 200 pages of you doing that thing you couldn't actually do.

But you got lucky and, you know, six pages of luck in one year and eight the next.

And the idea that you would basically try and to dress up your experience in language that wasn't its own, you know.

...