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 have as my guest, Glenn David Gold,

whose new novel is Sunnyside, published by Alfred A. Knapp.

His first novel was Carter Beats the Devil, and they're both, in a sense,

generated by history, but I would like to argue that somehow history is like the trampoline

from which these books ascend, and that somehow allowing you to move beyond the actual into the magical and the, I don't know, dreamlike is what I want to say, especially about Sunnyside, which takes place at just before and during the First World War.

For lack of a better way of describing it, it takes place during the period that Chaplin is shooting his shorts during the famous players period, yes.

And he's a star.

He's being paid like a star, but he hasn't yet made his first feature.

The book is kind of asking in a magnificent way, what is it that takes a person out of the realm of

the daily into the realm of the iconic, the unforgettable? And the book begins with an American

mass hallucination that is claimed to be somewhat true that people thought they saw Charlie Chaplin in all sorts of places around America.

The book claims some 800 places. What was happening and what did you do to it to make it happen like that?

When I was first starting to research the book, I noticed in David Robinson's biography of Chaplin. There's a little footnote at the bottom talking about Chaplin mania that happened.

As Chaplin became more and more famous and more a part of our American culture that all these things happened.

There was comic strips about them. You could buy little toys of Chaplin. Then he said,

and even he was spotted in 800 places at the same time. And I thought, what the heck was that?

...